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English in Urban Classrooms
English in Urban Classrooms is a ground-breaking text that spans a range of issues
central to contemporary school English. It attends not only to the spoken and
written language of classrooms, but also to other modes of representation and
communication that are important in English teaching. This includes image,
gesture, gaze, movement, and spatial organization.
The team of experienced and expert authors collectively examine how English
is shaped by policy, by institutions, and by the social relations of the classroom. By
connecting issues of policy and social context, the book provides a detailed
account of factors such as:
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•
•
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the characteristics of urban multicultural schools;
teacher formation and tradition;
the ethos of school English departments; and
the institutional changes that have shaped school English in urban classrooms and students’ experiences of learning.
This book offers a fascinating and enlightening read, not only to those involved in
English teaching, but also to educational researchers, policy makers, linguists,
and those interested in semiotics and multimodality.
Gunther Kress is Professor of Education and English at the Institute of Education,
University of London.
Carey Jewitt is Research Fellow at the Institute of Education, University of
London.
Jill Bourne is Professor of Primary Education at the School of Education, University of Southampton.
Ken Jones is Professor of Education at Keele University.
John Hardcastle, Anton Franks and Euan Reid are Lecturers at the Institute of
Education, University of London.
English in Urban Classrooms
A multimodal perspective on
teaching and learning
Gunther Kress, Carey Jewitt,
Jill Bourne, Anton Franks,
John Hardcastle, Ken Jones,
Euan Reid
First published 2005
by RoutledgeFalmer
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by RoutledgeFalmer
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
RoutledgeFalmer is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
© 2005 Gunther Kress, Carey Jewitt, Jill Bourne, Anton Franks,
John Hardcastle, Ken Jones, Euan Reid
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
English in urban classrooms: a multimodal perspective on teaching and learning /
Gunther Kress [et al.].
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. English language – Study and teaching (Secondary) – Social aspects – England – London.
2. Urban high schools – England – London. 3. English teachers – Training of – England –
London. I. Kress, Gunther R.
LB1631.E59 2004
428 '.0071'241—dc22
2004007612
ISBN 0-203-39730-4 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-67137-6 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-33169-2 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-33168-4 (pbk)
Contents
List of illustrations
List of contributors
Preface
1 Introduction
vi
vii
ix
1
2 A social and political framework for thinking about English
13
3 A new approach to understanding school English:
multimodal semiotics
21
4 The English classroom as a multimodal sign
37
5 The organization of time in the English classroom
69
6 The pedagogic construction of ‘ability’ in school English
83
7 The social production of character as an entity of school
English
99
8 Orchestrating a debate
116
9 Only write down what you need to know: annotation for what?
131
10 The textual cycle of the English classroom
141
11 And so to some final comments
165
References
Index
175
181
Illustrations
List of illustrations
4.1
4.2
4.3
4.4
4.5
4.6
4.7
4.8
4.9
4.10
4.11
4.12
4.13
6.1
6.2
7.1
7.2
8.1
Springton School: Susan’s classroom layout
Examples of the posters on the resource cupboard doors in
Susan’s classroom
Examples of the posters on the resource cupboard doors in
Susan’s classroom
Teacher-made text on ‘Masculinity and Romeo and Juliet’
displayed in Susan’s classroom
Wayford School: photograph of John’s classroom layout
John’s ‘arc of movement’ in his classroom
Images of the curriculum on John’s classroom wall
An example of a student text displayed on John’s classroom
wall
Wayford School: Lizzy’s classroom layout
Student texts displayed in Lizzy’s classroom
Ravenscroft School: Irene’s classroom layout
The curriculum as displayed in Irene’s classroom
Literature displays on the wall of Irene’s classroom
Springton School, Group 1: position of teacher and students
Springton School, Group 2: position of teacher and students
Ravenscroft School, representation of modes in use during
Diane’s lesson
Diane’s graphic representation of The Crucible
Representation of the teacher’s diagram on the board
44
45
45
46
49
50
53
54
58
59
63
64
65
91
91
106
108
120
Contributors
Contributors
Jill Bourne is Professor of Primary Education at the School of Education,
University of Southampton. She writes on discourse, language and identity.
Recent publications include The World Yearbook of Language Education (Kogan
Page 2003), edited with E. Reid.
Anton Franks was a teacher of drama and English in London schools and he is now
Lecturer on Drama and English in Education at the Institute of Education, University
of London. Recent publications include ‘Lessons from Brecht’ with Ken Jones in
Research in Drama Education 4(2) 1999 and ‘Drama, desire and schooling …’ in
Changing English 4(1) 1997.
John Hardcastle is Lecturer at the Institute of Education, University of London.
He taught English for fourteen years in a school in Hackney and subsequently he
was an advisory teacher in East London. He has written extensively about London
classrooms and he is a regular contributor to Changing English.
Carey Jewitt is Research Fellow at the Institute of Education, University of
London, and (co)editor of the journal Visual Communication (Sage). She writes on
visual and multimodal communication and learning. Her publications include
Knowledge, Literacy and Learning: Multimodality and New Technologies
(RoutledgeFalmer, forthcoming).
Ken Jones is Professor of Education at Keele University. He has written about
English teaching (English and the National Curriculum: Cox’s Revolution?
Kogan Page 1992), education policy (Education in Britain: 1944 to the Present,
Polity Press 2002) and is currently working on cultural histories of education.
Gunther Kress is Professor of Education and English at the Institute of Education,
University of London. His recent publications include Multimodal Discourse: The
Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication (Arnold 2001) with T. van
Leeuwen, and Literacy in the New Media Age (Routledge 2002).
viii Contributors
Euan Reid is Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Education, University of
London. His research interests are in education in multilingual societies and his
publications include Language in Education: World Yearbook of Education
(Kogan Page 2003), co-edited with J. Bourne.
Preface
Preface
This book is the direct outcome of a research project, ‘The Production of School
English’, conducted between 2001 and 2003, and funded by the ESRC (the
Economic and Social Science Research Council). In two ways it is also the
outcome of projects of very different kinds. One is the long sustained series of
‘educational reforms’ now in train since the late 1980s. These have affected all
aspects of institutional education in all kinds of ways, yet probably no subject more
so than English. While all aspects of teaching, all curriculum areas and all students,
are now subject to regimes of assessment and judgements of performance not seen
before, changes to the curricula of most subjects have been nowhere near as farreaching as those in English. That alone is an issue worthy of close attention –
namely, what is it about this subject, and its role in the school curriculum, that has
made it the focus of such change (see Jones 2003b)?
The other project is altogether more modest in scale: it concerns the work of the
SISC group (Subjectivity in the School Curriculum) over a period of about eight
years, which culminated in the submission of the proposal for the ‘Production of
School English’ project. The group – initially Jill Bourne, Roger Hewitt, Gunther
Kress, Euan Reid and Janet White – had met, from 1992 on, to reflect on the effect
of specific curricula on the formation of a pupil’s ‘subjectivity’: the question,
broadly framed, of what forms of subjectivity are suggested, fostered, implied,
produced even, in the contents and the organizations, the deeper epistemologies as
well as the implied pedagogies, of different subjects in the school curriculum.
Added to this was the equally salient question of how such differences might or
could play out in differential ways in the socially, ethnically and culturally deeply
diverse classrooms that characterize schools in so many contemporary societies.
The subjects that the SISC group had initially intended to work on were English
and Mathematics – less because of the political storms in which English was
embroiled during that period than because of the assumed inherent differences
between them.
Two ‘pilot studies’ were undertaken, each tracking English in the classroom.
The first was carried out over two terms in 1992, and based on detailed classroom
observation and taped recordings of students’ and teachers’ talk. This gave the
group much material for discussion about English; in part this was reported at
x Preface
several conferences, especially with a group of colleagues in Germany and the
Netherlands (Ingrid Gogolin, Sjaak Kroon, Jan Sturm in the context of the International Mother-tongue Education Network, IMEN). A later study (supported by a
small grant from the Institute of Education) involving the video-taping of three
lessons, enabled the group – by this time enlarged by the addition of Anton Franks,
John Hardcastle and Ken Jones – to focus very much more on the questions of
methodology to be used in any research on a bigger scale. The last member to join
the team, at the beginning of the project, was Carey Jewitt, as the full-time project
researcher; she was, in every way, a full member of the team from the very beginning, and her work helped to ensure the success of the project in all ways.
When the project began, in 2001, it was the largest funded study on English
since the major work of Barnes (1984). Hence it was also the first major study of
the subject after the impact of the educational reforms of the 1990s. But given the
lapse of time since 1984, it was also clear that in the intervening two decades there
had been vast (social) changes affecting how English could and might be taught, a
matter that was debated in the SISC group in relation to the data it had collected to
work with.
The other significant fact entailed in that gap in time is of course that of technology. In 1982 television was still the new and dominant electronic medium,
though at that time the book was still the culturally dominant medium in Western
societies – certainly so in schools, and absolutely so in English. By 2001 this had
changed profoundly. The now dominant media are the new screens: of the PC, the
Playstation, the Gameboy, and the mobile phone. And by 2001 the book had been
displaced by these ‘new screens’ as the culturally dominant medium, even though
its place seemed still – ostensibly – assured in schools, and in the English classroom. One among several things that our study shows is that in reality the book’s
role has waned, if not collapsed, even in English. In many English classrooms texts
appear as fragments, photocopied parts of larger texts. In the official anthologies in
use in English classrooms, the canonical texts of the official curriculum appear as
extracts, all set in the same uniform typeface; they are present as ‘text’ rather than
as texts.
And so it was inevitable that new questions would need to be asked about
English. Our first question was: ‘How is English produced? What does it come to
be when it is “made” in classrooms marked by such diversity?’ in the environment
of the pressure of new policies, in the turmoil often of the social environments of
the inner city – a time now, unlike 1982, when words such as ‘globalization’ are
part of common parlance. But the other question, suggested and made inevitable
by the impact of the new information and communication technologies, equally
profound, and equally challenging, is this: ‘What is the best way, now, of looking
at English? What methodology will do justice to understanding the subject now, in
this era?’
Our work rested on the help, the insights, the advice of many people. First and foremost are the teachers who so graciously permitted us to come into their classrooms.
Teachers now, more than ever, are under often near-unsustainable pressures, and the
Preface xi
presence of a researcher in a class might seem to be simply that straw that will break
the camel’s back. But we met with great generosity and openness, and without exception we found dedicated professionals whose single aim was to do that which would be
best for the young adults in their classrooms. Second must be the students, whose presence speaks everywhere in our discussion. We came to see that in the production of
English they too have a significantly agentive role. In a time when their role in society
at large is subject to such deep change (the ‘disappearance of childhood’, their incorporation into the forces of the market), their place in school is anything but easy and
straightforward.
We would like to thank the teachers and the students at the three schools who
participated in the research project that this book is based on. And then there are
the many colleagues who have helped us in essential ways: specifically we would
like to thank Courtney Cazden and David Russell for taking the time to look at
some of our data with us, to comment on draft papers and be part of an ongoing
discussion of the issues we address in this book. Many of the chapters in this book
have benefited from comments on earlier versions from a number of colleagues.
We would like to thank the following people for their comments, challenges and
insights: on working papers, Eve Bearne, Jeff Bezemer, Andrew Burn, Jan Derry,
Ian Grosvenor, Kris Gutierrz, Roxy Harris, Ingrid Gogolin, Bethan Marshall, Peter
Medway, Gemma Moss, Jon Ogborn, Sigmund Ongstad, Philip Scott, Mary Scott,
Brian Street, Jan Sturm and Theo van Leeuwen. In addition, each of us benefited
from ongoing conversations with colleagues and students ‘in’ education, at Keele
University, at Southampton University, and at the Institute of Education, University of London. Specifically we would like to mention Tony Burgess, Caroline
Daly, Charmian Kenner and Anne Turvey.
To all of them we give our thanks. Such acknowledgements are customary, yet it
is the case that in a project such as this there are innumerably many pitfalls, and the
chance to avoid at least some of them was a great help.
Lastly, making use of the role of ‘director’ of the project – a role that otherwise
remained only notional – I wish to step back to make a comment on the work of the
project team, and the writing of the book. The team, all of whom are the listed
authors of the book, worked together over a period of three years and a half. What
made our work constantly interesting and challenging was not just the inherent
interest of our questions, but the fact that every member of the team brought a quite
specific set of experiences, interests and competences as their particular contribution, all of which complemented each other. In the writing of the book the different
positions, viewpoints, ‘takes’ are at times readily discernible. We have attempted
to write in such a way as to reflect the fact that we collectively hold to and share the
position taken in the book; we have also thought it good to leave the differences in
‘voice’ or ‘tone’ that are noticeable at times. There seemed no need to deny that we
were seven people with distinct positions, who had come together in joint work on
a single project.
Gunther Kress
Chapter 1
Introduction
Introduction
The questions
In the project on which this book is based we posed two questions: one about the
school subject English, the other about a way of looking at English in the classroom. The first question, broadly, was this: how is English made; what, actually,
is it like; and how is it experienced when it appears in this specific classroom,
shaped by the mix of governmental curriculum policy, of the school’s response to
that policy, the variety of departmental traditions in the school and their ethos, the
social and geographical environment in which the school operates, the kinds of
students who come to the school, and last – but by no means least – the variations
in the professional trainings, experiences and backgrounds of the teachers? The
second question, the question about methodology, simply put, was this: what is
the best or the most appropriate way of looking at English, so that we might actually get a full understanding of its reality, in all ways, in the experience of students
and teacher alike, in any one classroom?
The first question may seem odd in that we were not, in any way at all, aiming at
a comprehensive, encompassing, representative picture of what English is now,
either in one place or in the whole of England. Neither the project nor this book
attempts to do that. What we do want to understand is the impact of fifteen years of
‘structural’ educational reform at the micro-level of the classroom. Further, we
want to be able to show what forces are at work to make the subject as it comes to
be in a particular place; in what ways these forces act; and whose power, whose
agency and what resources are at work, to what effect. We want to understand how,
in these contexts, the activities and relations of the classroom are patterned, and
how the school subject ‘English’ is constructed. The answer, we feel, will give us
and others a clearer sense of how we might act or respond to the ensemble of
factors that are always at work in any one place in educational settings at any one
time, so as to make such changes as might seem needed and possible.
But it may be that the second of the two questions seems more odd still: after all,
there has been and still is a clear enough sense, a consensus even, that the way to
look at English is to look at ‘talk’ in the classroom: talk around the important
objects of English, whatever they might be – valued texts, the texts and the
2 English in Urban Classrooms
experiences brought into the school by students from their different backgrounds,
and now, since the early 1990s, increasingly the objects and demands of the
national government. But, whatever the objects – the entities of the curriculum as
we shall call them from now on – it would always have been language as speech or
as writing that one would have been looking at, as has been the case in the definitive studies of the subject over the last 30 or 40 years. So against that past context,
we want to understand the construction or realization of English in its fullest sense.
For us this requires a multimodal approach.
A multimodal approach is one where attention is given to all the culturally
shaped resources that are available for making meaning: image, for instance, or
gesture, or the layout – whether of the wall-display, or the furniture of classrooms
– and of course writing and speech as talk. Mode is the name we give to these
culturally shaped resources for making meaning. Multi refers to the fact that modes
never occur by themselves, but always with others in ensembles. Multimodality is
characterized therefore by the presence and use of a multiplicity of modes. So
usually, in any lesson, several modes are ‘in use’ at the same time: the layout of the
classroom remains – more or less – fixed, as does the display on the walls; teachers
take up certain, always meaningful, positions in the space of the classroom, textual
objects are present and usually, but not always, all this is enveloped in talk. We see
all the modes as resources for making (different kinds of) meaning-as-signs. These
signs are of very many different kinds and ‘sizes’, but they are always inextricably
fused conjunctions of meaning and form. Putting it in disciplinary terms, our theoretical approach is a semiotic one, an approach that focuses on meaning in all the
ways it is made and read in culture.
This is an approach that cannot be taken off the shelf, as it were, but which must
be developed almost from first principles as part of the effort of understanding how
English in urban schools comes to be what it is. Lest we be misunderstood, we say
at once that this approach does not mean, of course, that we are not any longer
interested in speech (as talk) or in writing in its many forms. These are and remain
central means of producing that which English is; central means of making the
meanings of English material. We might even insist that our emphasis on looking
at all the means whereby the meanings of English are materialized entails a more
serious look at speech and at writing than hitherto taken. Where before there was a
common sense about the capacities of language, which left the potentials of what
language can do in many ways implicit and unexamined, now, looking at language
in the context of other means of making meaning gives the possibility of a much
sharper, more precise, more nuanced understanding both of the (different) potentials of speech and of writing, and of their limitations. A multimodal approach to
meaning-making provides a fuller, richer and more accurate sense of what
language is, and what it is not.
So our assumptions were and are different to those of past work. We assume that
what constitutes English is not to be found in language alone, but exists in many
modes, and in many tasks other than talking, reading, writing and listening. It is not
possible to restrict our ways of looking at English, our gaze, to English as
Introduction 3
constituted in language as speech or as writing. The meaning of English may now
reside as much in the teacher’s ‘bearing’, how he or she dresses, how the furniture
in the room is arranged, what the displays on the wall are, what gestures are used at
particular moments in the teacher’s practice, and so on, as much as they do in
speech as talk, or in writing. Our book provides many examples of this.
A brief interlude: a comparison of ‘English’
and ‘science’
If we wanted to ask, at a deep level, what school subjects are ‘about’, not focused
on contents so much as on deep orientations or dispositions, perhaps even on
epistemologies, we might say that some subjects are about the inculcation of skills
– dance might be an example, or sport. Others are about specific contents –
science or history might be examples here; and yet others might be about meaning
and about ways of knowing. English would be an example of the latter – or at least
it would have been until quite recently. If there is some point to our assumption
that English is about meaning, then everything in the English lesson and in the
English classroom that is meaningful contributes to what is taken to be the
meaning of English by students in the classroom. This is the basis for the
multimodal (semiotic) approach that we have taken in the project and are taking
here – rather than the linguistic approach that has dominated so much research on
English classrooms since the 1970s.
Meaning is made by individuals, though always acting in social environments,
using socially and culturally shaped and available resources. We might say that the
meanings made in the English classroom – as indeed meanings made elsewhere –
are social meanings, collectively made by different individuals as social agents; or
we can see them as individually made meanings, made with others, with socially
and culturally produced resources, in conditions of social constraints. Our formulation is meant to capture the constant and real co-presence and tension between
social agency and a recognition that there also always exists something that
appears to be more like individual agency.
Because the English classroom is about meaning, all meaning in the classroom
is (at least potentially always) significant. Everything, whether pedagogic or
curricular, is at least potentially likely to be seen as part of the meaning of English.
In contrast, we said that science, as an example, has traditionally been about
knowledge (Kress et al. 2001) – it is only recently that questions of ethics, or of
science’s problematic social impact, have begun to be raised in the school curriculum. The entities of the science curriculum have thus for the most part been
known and stable: the agency, or even the personality, of the science teacher is
unlikely to make a decisive difference to the appearance of the entity ‘magnetic
field’, for instance, in the classroom, nor of a ‘wave-form’, of ‘blood circulation’
or of a ‘plant cell’. The manner in which an entity is taught may differ significantly
from one classroom to the next, but students coming from different science classrooms would recognize these entities without difficulty.
4 English in Urban Classrooms
In the case of English that can not be assumed quite so easily, as our discussion
will show. Even though government policy attempts to move the English curriculum in the direction of the established paradigm of science – by making the
curricular entities much more explicit, for instance – it remains the case that the
form in which a specific entity is produced will vary in significant ways from classroom to classroom: the entity ‘character’, to take an example that we discuss in
detail later. In one classroom ‘character’ may appear in a form that makes it quite
like ‘person’: a person maybe like you and me, or maybe different, but a person
whose characteristics are not remote from our everyday experience of people. In
another classroom, the ‘same’ entity may appear as the vehicle for the development and realization of elevated and complex moral and political attributes: quite
remote from – even if still connected and recognizable to – our everyday
experience.
The social participants in the construction of entities in the English classroom
have an effect on the shape of the entity, a situation that can not readily be imagined in subjects such as mathematics, science, geography, and others. The possibilities of the fusion of (inter-)personal and of ideational meanings is very different
in English compared to other subjects, even though there is now a strong move to
make English conform in these respects more and more to the model of those other
subjects. In some of the schools we visited this was more the case than in others:
some teachers had welcomed the move and had begun to incorporate its possibilities into their teaching, in interestingly different ways; others were more resistant.
In any case, it is a matter that is very much in process.
Given this difference, there is a further reason for our multimodal ‘way of looking’. Even though in science the curricular entities are clearly established, the
manner of their materialization is very often now an open one: should it be materialized in the form of image; should it be word; which textual form would seem
best? Nevertheless, in science, the distinction of pedagogy and curriculum is clear,
and whatever the pedagogic approach taken it has very little if any effect on how
the entities eventually emerge in the classroom: a bar magnet, or a magnetic field,
remains just that, whatever the pedagogy. In English that is not the case – some
entities may never appear explicitly, some may never appear as spoken or written:
the question of ‘literary sensibility’ for instance – not directly a part of the official
curriculum, but still very much a part of the unofficial curriculum for many
teachers – is never spoken but emerges in actional modes. And the appearance of
those entities stipulated by the official curriculum do appear in very different form.
The meaning of English can lie as much in curriculum as in pedagogy, and in any
case the distinction is often quite unclear or implicit.
The question of what modes might be best for the materialization of different
kinds of meanings is a real one in science as in English but differently so: in
English, quite often, what cannot be spoken (because it is and needs to remain
implicit), might need to be enacted. In science the question of choice of mode
never focuses on the need or the facts of implicitness. Where choice of mode
becomes an issue in science it is around two different questions: ‘What is the apt
Introduction 5
mode to materialize this entity?’ and ‘What is the best way to materialize this entity
for this audience, this group of students?’ – that is, the matter of rhetorical effectiveness. So the question of choice between image and writing might be resolved by
asking for any particular group of students ‘Is image or is writing better to materialize this entity (“magnetic field”, “water-cycle”, “solar system”, and so on)?’ and
‘Is image or writing better, in the sense of ‘more appealing?’
Of course, in this counterposing of science and English, we posit a re-emergence
of a split between a world of ‘fact’ and a world of ‘value’, a distinction that is not be
completely tenable; our point is rather to draw attention to a tendency, for slightly
polemical purposes.
The data
This book is based on the research project ‘The Production of School English’,
funded by the ESRC. The project took place over three years, from November
2000 to October 2003. The project data is primarily in the form of classroom
observation and video-recording, together with in-depth interviews with students
and teachers from our project schools. It was collected in the spring and summer
term of the school year 2000–01. It is important to note here that the project data
was therefore collected before the introduction of the (now no longer new) Key
Stage 3 Strategy – a strategy that has attempted to unify pedagogy in the same way
as the National Curriculum attempts to unify curriculum. Despite this important
shift in policy and practice, we feel that our research aims retain their validity and
that our results still enable an understanding of how the subject is currently
produced and of the forms it can take.
The analysis we set out – which explores the ways in which policy, made at a
macro-level, is inflected in the actualization of English in the micro-level of the
classroom – has explanatory power beyond the immediate moment on which it
focuses.
The schools
Our research focused on urban schools, specifically on three ‘state’ secondary
schools in Inner London. There were several reasons for such a choice, beyond the
researchers’ familiarity with this kind of social setting. First, we wanted to find
out what might be happening in schools where the vision of uniform entitlement
embodied in the National Curriculum encountered the ‘contexts of disadvantage’
of which Inner London schools tend to provide examples. In this encounter, we
thought, there was much to learn about the difficulties of the National Curriculum
project. Secondly, we thought that the attempts of teachers to actualize English in
contexts of social, cultural, ethnic, religious and linguistic difference would
produce illuminating data about the variable and negotiated qualities of English.
Thirdly – knowing that Inner London had historically been a region where
English teachers had developed a rich and heterodox tradition of subject
6 English in Urban Classrooms
development – we wanted to explore the continuing effects of such a history on
present-day classrooms, and therefore to understand ‘English’ as something
created in an area of tension between contending projects and influences.
We have named the three schools Springton, Wayford and Ravenscroft. Each is
co-educational, with an English department known (as credible) to the project
team – the schools are all part of the initial teacher education partnership scheme
with the Institute of Education. The demographics of the student population were
also used as a criterion for selection. Each school has a student population that can
be described as ethnically diverse (including a settled White working-class population), with a significant refugee population (over 20 per cent), and with many
students from low-income families (indicated by the percentage of students
receiving free school meals, with 43 per cent being the lowest figure). We selected
schools that were similar in that they met these criteria and different in that they
represented a wide range in terms of their officially perceived ‘success’: improving
(Springton School), under special measures (Wayford School), and a foundation
school, so called (that is, a school judged to be successful: Ravenscroft School).
Each of these is described briefly in the next section. We do not wish to characterize the schools other than through our descriptions of the practices as they
appear in our data, and instead of offering three thumbnail sketch of the institutions
we discuss each school in the context of the analysis of specific aspects of the
production of English. In this way we hope that a more nuanced sense of what the
schools do and what they are will gradually emerge.
Springton School
Springton is situated in a locality made up of different ethnic communities, and as
it has a policy of open entry it has a diverse ethnic population. There are, and have
historically been, considerable tensions between the ethnic groups in the community that the school serves, tensions that are realized along racial and ethnic
lines, which at times emerge in the form of severe street violence.
The school has a high proportion of minority ethnic students (81 per cent) primarily
Bangladeshi and a significant number of BlackAfrican students. A high percentage of
students have English as an additional language (80 per cent), and of these students a
significant number (14 per cent) are at an early stage of language acquisition. Of these
students a significant percentage are refugees (30 per cent), mainly from African countries. Springton also has a high percentage of working-class families (65 per cent of
students receive free school meals). Standards in English overall are well below the
national average in all forms of assessment at Key Stages 3 and 4. English classes are
mixed-ability, and the school itself does not have a policy of selection.
Wayford School
Wayford is a large school serving a number of wards and boroughs that are characterized by significant social deprivation. At the time of the research the school
Introduction 7
was placed under ‘special measures’. The school’s student population is ethnically diverse. It contains a high percentage of students of minority ethnic backgrounds (primarily Black Caribbean, Black African, and Bangladeshi); there is
also a significant White student population including (8 per cent) White UK.
Around a third of the school’s students (33 per cent) are from refugee or asylumseeker families. Overall the school has a high percentage of students with English
as an additional language (66 per cent) with a significant percentage of these
students at an early stage of language acquisition (29 per cent), with native
speakers of Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese and Farsi. The school has a significant
percentage of students from working-class families (53 per cent of students
receive free school meals). Student levels of attainment when they arrive at the
school are well below the national average and standards in English overall are
well below the national average in all forms of assessment at Key Stages 3 and 4.
English classes are mixed-ability. Like Springton, this school does not operate a
policy of selection.
Ravenscroft School
Ravenscroft is a foundation school – formerly a grant-maintained school – and it
operates with both a policy of selection (25 per cent of the total intake) and
streamed ability classes. It is situated in an area with a significant Black population that is characterized by social deprivation. The school student population is
ethnically diverse with 60 per cent of students from minority ethnic backgrounds
(primarily Black Caribbean, Black African, Indian, Pakistani, Chinese and
Bangladeshi). A significant number of students (27 per cent) have English as an
additional language; many of these are speakers of Cantonese, Bengali, Gujarati
and Urdu. The school has a significant number of students from low-income families, with 43 per cent of students receiving free school meals.
The teachers
We observed the lessons of three English teachers in each of the schools, over the
spring and summer terms in the school year 2000–01. The teachers were identified by the head of department in each school to reflect the range of experience
within the department, although all were teachers who volunteered to participate
in the project. Here, rather than give a ‘biography’ or ‘characterization’ of each
teacher that we observed, we will just name and locate them in relation to the three
schools (teachers and students have been given pseudonyms throughout the
book). We have resisted the tradition of characterizing the teachers: our focus is
on the production of English, and for reasons that have to do both with utility and
ethics we do not want to focus unduly or over-emphatically on the roles and
responsibilities of individuals within the very complex setting in which the
subject is actualized. However, we do offer some details about teachers’ backgrounds, experiences, roles or philosophies wherever we have thought these to be
8 English in Urban Classrooms
appropriate to understanding the production of English.
The teachers we observed at Springton were Julia, Anna and Susan; at Wayford
John, Stephen and Lizzy; at Ravenscroft Irene, Diane and Paul.
The lessons
We observed each of the teachers teaching one or two lessons per week over a
half-term period (between seven and eight weeks). The selection of which module
and sequence of lessons to observe was influenced by the demands of the fieldwork and the time available. Overall we attempted to observe lessons on the range
of topics being taught within the schools. These included Shakespeare, Wider
Reading, Media, Twentieth-century Drama, and Poetry. Below we sketch the
content of the lessons that we observed in each school.
Springton
•
•
•
Julia: Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet)
Anna: Shakespeare (Macbeth)
Susan: Poetry (’Hearts and Partners’ NEAB anthology)
Wayford
•
•
•
John: Wider reading (Kiss Miss Carol, and Superman and Paula Brown’s
New Snowsuit)
Stephen: Media in English (film trailers)
Lizzy: Media in English (film title sequences)
Ravenscroft
•
•
•
Irene: Wider reading (Theresa’s Wedding, Three Sisters)
Diane: Twentieth-century drama (The Crucible)
Paul: Media in English (comparison of broadsheets and tabloids)
In the classroom observations we did not set out to seek particular activities and
we did not ask to see specific aspects of teaching; we aimed instead to observe the
‘mundane’ flow, the ‘everyday’ production of English in each of the classrooms.
Data collection
We combined a number of methods of data collection. We observed the teachers
and students over the half-term period, and video-recorded a series of lessons. We
video-recorded between three and six lessons with each teacher. Lessons were
recorded using two small digital cameras, one focused primarily on the students
and the other on the teacher and his or her interaction with the students. (Students
Introduction 9
were asked for consent to be video-recorded and students who did not want to be
recorded were not included on video.) The video data was supplemented with
observational notes made by the project researcher. Copies were made and details
collected of the materials used in the classroom (such as worksheets, books,
videos, and so on). Throughout the data-collection phase the project researcher
asked teachers for clarification of aspects of the lesson, engaged in informal
discussion with teachers and students, and gathered information and comments
from students and teachers alike.
Formal in-depth interviews were conducted with each teacher at the end of the
observations. These interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. The interviews were based on a topic guide. This topic guide covered general areas such as
the teacher’s ‘career biography’, ‘the school and its student population’, ‘visions
of English’, and ‘the curriculum’. The topic guide also addressed specific points
raised by the lessons observed, such as the teacher’s use and selection of texts, the
history of work units, and the rationale behind specific events that had occurred.
Group interviews were conducted with between four and six students from each
class that we observed. The students were selected to reflect the range of students
in the class (in terms of ethnicity, gender and ‘ability’ as determined by the
teacher). These interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. The interviews
used a topic guide that covered areas such as what students read outside of school,
and focused primarily on ‘scenarios’ from the lessons that had been observed and
were considered to establish what they thought of specific instances of school
English.
Policy documents from each school were collected. These included English
department policy, such as homework strategies, and school policy, such as behaviour policies. Documents were also collected in relation to nationally driven policies and activities, as manifested in Ofsted reports, National Curriculum
documents and so on.
The question of theory
One problem that we have faced in the project and in the book is that the world we
investigated consists of many agents, actors, institutions, practices and traditions.
Hence in our data-set we deal with quite disparate kinds of things, different kinds
of data, which are not easily or at all accommodated within one theoretical framework. For instance, how can one deal with government policy on curriculum and
at the same time connect that with the matter of layout of a classroom? Or set out a
theory that claims to bring together wall-displays with forms of pedagogy? Or
how do we group, in one coherent framework, a notion of (say, the literary) text
with an approach that sees classroom layout also as text-like – how, in what ways
are both these objects text-like? How can these very different elements to brought
into meaningful conjunction?
Our solution has been to adopt as our overarching framework a semiotic theory.
We explain in Chapter 4 how the layout of a classroom, for instance, as much as the
10 English in Urban Classrooms
wall display is an indication – a sign – of a teacher’s sense of English, and how
both layout and wall display are therefore full of meaning in relation to English.
The semiotic notion of the sign allows us to show how meaning and form are inextricably intertwined: layout (and its use in classroom practice) provides a form
through which the meaning of pedagogy is strongly realized; form and meaning
jointly making a sign that realizes the meaning at issue. The semiotic approach
allows us to provide coherence across all the different kinds of data in our description and analysis.
However, our presentation of the theory is written with the interests of practitioners in mind. Any reader who would like to follow the lines of our theory further
can do so by following up some of the books referenced (such as Jewitt forthcoming; Jewitt and Kress 2003b; Kenner 2000; Kress and van Leeuwen 1996,
2001; Kress et al. 2001; Pahl 1999; van Leeuwen 1999; van Leeuwen and Jewitt
2001).
There is one further point to make here. We have not focused on talk, and have
given some of our reasons for doing so already. Yet we did collect data by interviewing teachers and students: we conducted ‘focus groups’, all of which have
produced much talk. This raises the question of the mode of transcription that we
have used. Transcription is translation, and all translations are partial; the partiality
in the case of research derives from the theoretical perspective of the research.
Transcriptions are never value free; they are theory laden. Some of our readers will
find our transcriptions of talk – whether of the teachers or the students – pretty
rough and ready, which they are. Anyone who has transcribed speech will have
found that what sounds entirely articulate when spoken looks ragged and often
inarticulate when transcribed. As our collective sense of what constitutes ‘proper’
English is shaped by the written form, the consequence of transcription is that the
speech transcribed seems to ‘fall far short’ of the seeming standards of the written
norm. The speaker of the transcribed speech seems inarticulate. The plain fact of
the matter is that the structures even of formal speech are quite unlike those of
formal writing, which provides, inappropriately, the standards of comparison. The
textual and syntactic structures of informal and even of formal speech are, quite
simply, different from those of writing – and for very good reasons. In the face of
this problem, our choice was either to ‘prettify’, to edit the speech of teachers and
students – a falsification of the data, for bad reasons – or to draw attention to the
fact that speech is different in its syntax and texture to writing, and that ‘speaking
like a book’ is not necessarily something we ought to attempt in all aspects of our
lives. The teachers and the students whose speech is represented in this book were
fully articulate; and we did not wish to engage in cosmetic work of some kind in
order to continue to support deep misconceptions about speech.
The organization of this book
Chapters 2 and 3 sketch the essential broad theoretical framework of our study.
Most of Chapter 2 is devoted to questions of history and social and political
Introduction 11
context. Chapter 3 offers an outline of the theoretical framework of multimodal
semiotics – it is the descriptive core of our theory, as well as being the leastknown component of our approach. We deal lightly with theory – here and in
other parts – but to avoid all technicality is actually to sell readers short in important ways and so we provide such theoretical background as is essential for understanding our argument. At the same time we have provided what we hope is a
persuasive, concrete and useful account of the actualization of English, available
to theorists, policy-makers and practitioners alike.
From Chapter 2 and 3’s theoretical framing of our work we move, in Chapter 4,
to the description and analysis of classroom layout and wall displays, suggesting
that they have a quite specific role in shaping and defining what English is in that
classroom. In Chapter 5 we move from this microanalysis of space to an account of
the time practices of the classroom, and their relationship to the ways in which
policy (though teachers as well) seeks to organize educational time.
In Chapter 6 the focus moves to a quite other organizational principle. Here we
explore how teachers’ understanding of ‘ability’ – an understanding expressed at
times in the formal organization of the school, and sometimes in the more informal
but nonetheless deliberate groupings of the classroom – has profound effects on
the interaction of teachers and students, and on the actualization of English, for
both parties.
In Chapter 7 our focus shifts overtly to the curriculum. We want to show how
curriculum entities appear in quite different ways in different classrooms. To do so
we focus on one central entity, namely that of character. Our aim is to show how
specific, concrete decisions taken by a school or by a curriculum authority, by a
teacher or by her or his department, interact with the students’ own interests to
bring forth quite different conceptions or versions of what ‘character’ might mean.
To put it another way, the chapter seeks to show that even in conditions of strong
prescription, a degree of freedom of movement exists and can be utilized by the
teacher in line with her or his sense of English for that class.
In Chapter 8, one teacher is in focus. Here we wish to illustrate on the one hand
how so much that goes on in the classroom is dependent on modes other than
spoken or written language, and on the other to show that in a school that has made
the decision to select a significant proportion of its students, and to use streaming
in addition to that, English comes to have a quite specific appearance that we think
can be traced back to these decisions, in large part at least. It is not that the aims and
demands of the National Curriculum disappear here, but that they are not immediately in the foreground. What is foregrounded for this teacher, in this class, is what
English might offer to these young people as a means of making sense of salient
problems in their lives. One feels this teacher’s sense is that the demands of the
curriculum can be met better if the students’ needs have priority over those of the
subject as such. The ‘subject’s needs’ are by no means forgotten by this teacher,
but they are approached and met via attention to the needs of the students.
In Chapter 9 we focus on a common practice in the English classroom, namely
that of annotation of texts. Here too we are interested in demonstrating how the
12 English in Urban Classrooms
wider set of conditions of the school’s environment, and the school’s and the
teachers’ response to these, crucially shapes what English comes to be. With that
chapter we want to begin to show that there is a consistent, insistent pressure from
all these many factors on all areas of the curriculum: the factors shape the layout
and use of the layout of the classroom; they shape notions of ability; they shape the
curriculum, and what is considered a ‘text’ in English. In Chapter 10, our last databased chapter, we look at how texts are chosen for the English classroom; here we
want to round off our discussion by showing how the selection, and use, of texts
illustrates the ‘fit’ of all the social factors that constitute the environment of
English, and come to shape its appearance.
Chapter 2
A social and political framework
for thinking about English
A social and political framework
Introduction
This book is about the construction of the secondary school subject English in
multi-ethnic urban settings. It is thus in some respects a case study, but in methodological, theoretical and substantive aspects it aims to be something wider. It
brings together two aspirations. The first has to do with a history of the educational present. Since 1988, education in England has been remade at every level
from national systems of governance to classroom pedagogies. The roles and
identities of education’s social actors have also been transformed, in ways that
have profoundly affected parents, teachers and students. In the research project on
which this book is based, we wanted to explore one particular facet of this
remaking, in ways that could illuminate the wider process and contribute to an
understanding both of curricular and pedagogic change, and of the way such
change has been lived by those involved in it. The focus we chose was the school
subject English – a choice that arose both from our professional and academic
formations and from a sense that English remains, in many ways, key to understanding aspects of change that had barely been grasped by other researchers. We
make the case for such a focus in the pages that follow.
Our second aspiration is methodological and theoretical. This, too, is elaborated
below. Here it is enough to state our belief that English – like other school subjects,
of course – is not an entity that can be understood solely through the analysis of
formal curricula, or even through extensive interviews with those who teach it.
English is ‘actualized’: however powerful the regulatory frameworks that scaffold
it may be, they do not determine its nature – for this is not pre-established, but realized in practice. This is an insight shared by many pedagogical theorists (such as
Menck 1995 and Englund 1997), but to operationalize the insight is a problematic
matter. Traditionally, researchers have explored actualization through an analysis
of classroom language (for example Mercer 2000; Sinclair and Coulthard 1975),
but such a focus can produce only very partial data. As we have already insisted,
classrooms are places where communication extends far beyond the modes of
spoken and written language: they are multimodal sites, sites where meanings are
made through many differing means, and where resources such as gesture, gaze,
14 English in Urban Classrooms
posture, and the deployment of visual objects are crucially important to meaningmaking. Our research aimed to explore these dimensions of communication and in
doing so to present a more complete account of English as an actualized subject. In
other words, to understand English in its full dimensions, and to understand the
ways in which it creates new kinds of identity for students and teachers, we
regarded a multimodal approach as essential.
The two aspirations provide combined rather than separate perspectives. The
forms taken by multimodal communication are shaped through social agency – the
agency of teachers and students, of the immediate environment of a school, and of
‘remoter’ but nonetheless potent forces, such as those which contribute to policymaking or the definition of curricula. To explain why and how school English
assumes the shapes that it does entails attention not only to the contexts provided
by educational policy but also to a microanalysis of communicational forms. That
latter is the focus of Chapter 3; here, in this chapter, it is policy and social issues
that are the subject of our attention.
Re-agenting the school
We spoke in our opening paragraph of a deep remaking of educational practice. In
the section that follows we offer an account of the main features of this transformation. But we need first of all to note that not all that is significant in the classrooms we observe is new. The teacher’s situation has always been linked to the
cultural, moral and occupationally allocative roles of the school. These roles have
varied according to the relative distance of the populations of the school from the
positional social good constituted by ‘education’. As Bourdieu (1974) insists,
school is a site of an encounter between formal, organized prescriptions relating
to knowledge and behaviour and the value orientations and cultural capacities and
experiences of students – an encounter that is marked by difference and
inequality. We claim, along with Bourdieu, that the interpersonal and ideational
transactions of education are shaped by social relationships of this kind and that
the classroom is in important ways a site of conflicts, to which the teacher’s
rhetorical activity (about which we say more below) is a response. It is in this
context that we should note the consistency over time of the forms taken by such
aspects of material culture as the architecture of schools and the design of classrooms, as well as by the classroom regulation of such activities as speaking,
silence and movement (Hamilton 1989; Walkerdine 1990).
Our focus, though, is more on the conjunctural than on the enduring; the
perspective that we seek to develop is one from which can emerge a consistent
pattern of change in the social relations and communicative forms of contemporary schooling. Especially significant in this context is the tendency to which we
give the name ‘re-agenting’ (Jones 2003a). Re-agenting involves a redistribution
of the capacity to shape the work of the school, so that the power of some kinds of
agent is increased, while that of others diminishes, or is re-directed to other levels
of the system – from curriculum design, for instance, to curriculum ‘delivery’. We
A social and political framework 15
can trace such a process across several fields of post-1988 educational reform, and
in relation to varied types of educational actor.
Most evident, of course, are the regulatory frameworks that government has
designed for curricula and now, increasingly, for pedagogy. These include the
National Curriculum, examination syllabuses, and the National Literacy
Framework, which was extended from primary to secondary schools after the
period of our research. These function so as to increase the extent of central direction of teachers’ work – a direction that at the same time reduces teachers’
autonomy. Regulatory frameworks are accompanied by enforcement strategies,
which include Ofsted inspection, national systems of testing, and the stipulation of
targets for student attainment that schools are expected to achieve or else face
various kinds of additional supervision and penalty. Targets are monitored by
school management whose role has become, since 1988, an increasingly active
one, and who are equipped (as Hextall and Mahony (2000) have shown) with a
varied armoury of devices with which to stipulate, measure and assess teacher
performance. Teachers themselves have developed several new kinds of expertise,
especially in relation to organizing higher levels of student achievement measured
against externally determined performance criteria.
We can discern similar changes among students and among parents. In the
1970s, the success rate in GCE English Language amounted to no more than
around 30 per cent and most students were untouched by high-stakes public examination. Since 1985, when GCSE examinations were introduced (to be followed at
the end of the decade by the National Curriculum), there has been a steady rise in
measured attainment, with more than 50 per cent of students obtaining an A–C
grade in GCSE English. More and more students have been drawn into the certification process; success or failure in public examinations has become a central
experience of the careers of most secondary school students. This we take to be a
cultural change of some importance, one that has reshaped values and behaviour.
If many students have been drawn into a process of what some have termed
‘responsibilization’ (Gewirtz 1998; Rose 1990) through which they are incited to
involve themselves in the performance culture of the school, the same process
extends to parents. There is much research that demonstrates the role of middleclass parents as active pursuers of the opportunities presented by parental choice in
a ‘marketized’ system of schooling (Gewirtz et al. 1995). Likewise, researchers
have studied the level of parents’ investment of time and money in home learning
as a preparation for success at school (Buckingham and Scanlon 2003; Reay 1998).
But what also needs to be recognized is something akin to a regulation of parenting
by a school system based on cultures of academic performance and orientated also
towards a version of social inclusion. Miriam David (2002) has pointed out the
importance of the 1998 School Standards and Framework Act in this respect – it
legislated for ‘a whole range of home–school relations through statutory home–
school agreements and homework policies, including study support and homework centres, literacy and numeracy strategies and … various forms of parenting
education’. Many parents, among them some of the authors of this book, have
16 English in Urban Classrooms
found themselves being (re)positioned by such processes, in ways that give an
added edge to academic discussions of schooling and cultural change: what
teachers and students experience is not that remote either from the working lives of
researchers, or from their involvement as parents in a performance-orientated
system.
To write of re-agenting is to evoke change, a movement from one condition to
another. We’ve suggested above something of the condition to which policydriven re-agenting aspires. But we also need to understand the condition from
which it seeks to depart, not least because the understanding of policy-makers is
that they are involved in a process of conflictual transformation, in which one of
the main targets of policy is an educational past understood in extremely critical
terms. New Labour is less inclined to celebrate previous reforming projects as an
earlier part of an ongoing process of incremental change than to present them in a
critical light, as flawed and failed. Comprehensive reform, and local and professional autonomy are from this perspective blighted by their low expectations of
students, and by their preference for ‘egalitarianism’ above ‘standards’ (DfEE
2001).
From the discontent of policy-makers developed an intention to reshape the attitudes, values and behaviour of all groups involved in schooling – students and
parents as well as teachers. But teachers, especially, have been regarded as the
necessary object of a strategy of modernization (Luke and Luke 2001), and as
various writers have suggested (Hextall and Mahony 2001; Moore 2001) much
government policy has been directed towards such an end. English has been
strongly involved in the resultant conflicts.
English has a past that has worried recent designers of policy. Its former lack of
a defined subject content meant that especially between 1960 and the late 1980s,
the period of what Grace (1987) has called ‘licensed teacher autonomy’, it was a
subject more autonomous than most, and as such came later to be a particular target
of government reform. But the peculiarities of English have extended beyond
questions of autonomy. Particularly in urban schools, English has at points
connected to wider projects. Its vision of learning has always been informed by
cultural purposes of various kinds – as the influence of Leavis early in the period
demonstrates. Increasingly in the 1970s and 1980s, such projects were developed
in ways that were attuned to issues of cultural diversity among students. Grace
suggests that the core of this development was adherence to a principle of radical
dialogue that ‘dignified the student and the status of his or her language, theorising
and culture’ and that hoped to see the school become ‘an arena for the representation of a rich variety of cultural patterns, forms of communication and levels of
consciousness’ (Grace 1995: 219).
To put it another way, there developed in pockets of the state system a radical
educational culture that questioned the values, traditions and allegiances of the
school, and worked on alternative practices that were to some extent sympathetic
to the experiences and cultural meanings of subordinate social groups (Jones
2003a).
A social and political framework 17
Such practices have been the focus of a governmental strategy of attrition,
carried on explicitly in the period of Conservatism, where school English faced
both ideological criticism and curricular reshaping; and also pursued with less of
an ideological ‘edge’ but arguably to more potent practical effect under New
Labour. To write an account of the construction of English as a moment in the
history of the present thus involves seeking to identify the impact of a number of
forceful social agents on an already established field. It involves attention to questions of conflict, replacement and rupture, and looks for their traces in the practices
it examines.
But of course, the construction of English in urban schools cannot be reduced to
a collision between two kinds of movement, one professionally based, the other
governmental. The space of classroom English is much more disparate than this –
there are many discourses, many communicative practices at play, and we need to
work an understanding of these into the overall framework of analysis if it is
capture the complexities of ‘realization’. To do so will have the effect of qualifying
some of the deterministic connotations of the term ‘reagenting’: government may
have deeply rearranged the working practices and life worlds of teachers, but there
remain nevertheless school spaces of varying ‘sizes’. Within these spaces, the
(always social) histories of individual teachers, the evolved working practices of
departments, the character of relationships with students, and the organization and
culture of the school all contribute to the realization of English, demonstrating that
agency is not a capacity possessed only by government. Certainly we think that the
impact of government-driven redesign, and the re-agenting that goes with it, can be
registered in all of the data that we assemble in this book. But it does not represent
– as it were – the only discourse and legitimated practice in town. Schools remain
spaces of multiple discourse and practice. National norms and regulatory frameworks have without doubt worked themselves into the ‘capillaries’ of the school.
But they are inflected and modified by other positions, which stem from local situations as well as the associational cultures of teachers. The balance of power
between national framework and classroom practice has been altered, but not to the
extent where the influence of the local and the associational has been entirely
eradicated.
English as combination – English as construction
We move now from considerations of agency more directly to those of realization. In 1995, Gunther Kress wrote:
English is a number of curricula, around which the English teacher has to
construct some plausible principles of coherence. It is, first, a curriculum of
communication, at the moment largely via its teaching around English
language … It is, second, a curriculum of notions of sociality and of culture:
what England is, what it is to be English. This is carried through a plethora of
means: how the language English is presented and talked about, especially in
18 English in Urban Classrooms
multi-lingual classrooms; what texts appear and how they are dealt with; what
theories of text and language underlie pedagogies, and so on. English is also a
curriculum of values, of taste and of aesthetics. Here the study of canonical
texts is crucial, in particular their valuation in relation to texts of popular
culture … And … English is the subject in which ethics, questions of social,
public morality are constantly at issue … in terms of giving children the
means of dealing with ethical, moral issues … and absorbing the ethos developed in the classroom.
(Kress 1995: 5–6)
Curriculum and pedagogic change since 1995 has perhaps simplified some of
these issues, but without attenuating Kress’s central point: the ensemble of classroom English is complex – a bricolage of methods, a plurality of purposes and
objectives. Moreover, it is one that is constructed, and reconstructed, day after day,
in the work of teachers, teaching in contexts over which they never have full
control, which are subject to the influence of policy, institution, department and
students, and shaped also by a wider politics of education.
We want to understand this process of construction. We differ here from others
who have asked the question ‘What is English?’, and who have sought their
answers on terrain defined by the ideas of teachers, elicited through interviews, or
the codified and inevitably over-coherent representations of the subject to be found
in policy documents or canonical statements (Ball et al. 1990; Davies 1996; Doyle
1989; Marshall 2000). Such work is invaluable in mapping terms of debate, and in
identifying textual evidence of paradigm shifts. But as a means of exploring the
more tacit understandings and enactments of the subject English that come to the
fore in teachers’ classroom practice it is less useful.
By contrast, we are interested in studying the moment of the subject’s actualization in the practice of the teacher. As Peter Menck puts it, the teacher is a key social
actor who must ‘interpret a multi-levelled contextual situation and in doing so
actualize his/her subject’ (Menck 1995). Likewise, for Tomas Englund, the teacher
has different possibilities in relation to the creation and construction of meaning,
and these possibilities become ‘concretized in different ways in different classrooms’ (1997: 277). The analytic work of subject description, for Englund, entails
identifying the ways in which teachers draw from the academic disciplines that
stand behind the school subject; it involves sketching the ways in which they position their teaching against the various paradigms of the subject that exist in educational practice. Importantly, this positioning has a social as well as a knowledgefocused element. Subjects, actualized in particular classrooms, can be inflected in
radically different ways, from patriarchal to democratic.
Up to a point, these are productive approaches, which go beyond the methodological simplifications of some paradigms of subject-based research. In particular,
they shift the grounds of discussion away from the abstract essentialism implied by
the question ‘What is English?’, to the more productive question ‘What happens
when the subject called English is taught and learned?’. But for our purposes, they
A social and political framework 19
are in several ways incomplete. First, they do not analyse non-linguistic forms of
communication. Second, in their over-emphatic concentration on the teacher, they
tend not to see the subject’s relationship to the school as a social organization, and
to the system of resources and constraints that is embedded there. Third, they lack a
strong historical or conjectural dimension; unlike the work of, say, Ball and his
colleagues, they’re relatively uninterested in describing and explaining shifts from
one type of curriculum and pedagogy to another.
In these respects, our work moves beyond the ‘actualization’ paradigm. We
share with it a focus on the work of the teacher, which we see as central to the
production of English, but our understanding of the teacher’s role is more strongly
textual – in its attention to the modes of meaning-making in classrooms – and at the
same time more strongly social, in its attempts to explore forces that shape these
classroom processes of semiosis. Thus we are interested in the ways in which
teachers structure their communication with students, and organize the events that
occur in the single space of the classroom. We argue that in their communicational
practice teachers create texts – multimodal combinations of communicatively
orientated utterances and actions. We seek to understand these texts socially. To
explain this ambition requires a brief résumé of the theories of communication and
meaning-making on which we depend.
We see language and by extension other modes of communication as resources
constituted by sets of semiotic alternatives, which have taken on their particular
forms because of the social functions they have evolved to serve. These resources
form the meaning potential of a culture. We see individuals as social agents who in
organizing their communication make choices from among these resources. Such
choices are motivated – that is, signs relate to the social interests of the sign-maker
and represent the sign-maker’s decisions about the expression of the meaning that
he or she wishes to make in a given context. These decisions are not, of course,
fully explicit or conscious. Moreover, they are not the creation of a single maker.
They are, as Volosinov (1973) argued, multi-accentual. Whomever they are made
by, they are always also a response to, and an anticipation of, other signs. They
need to be understood relationally, and to understand them thus is also to understand them as an enactment of social relations. In addition, signs have regularities
of use. The more work a culture has put into a semiotic resource, and the more it
has been used in social life, the more fully and finely articulated and ‘regularized’
it will have become. These regularities are what have traditionally been called
‘grammars’, and an aspect of which more recent communicational theory has
addressed as ‘genres’.
Teachers are engaged in particular kinds of sign-making, which very often take
the form of public communication. The analysis of such communication has a
history that goes back to ancient Athens, in the form of rhetorical, Aristotelian
theory. In such theory, rhetoric is ‘speech designed to persuade’, to affect an audience and to effect particular actions. To do so, the rhetor must discover among a
pre-existing repertoire of communicational resources some available means of
persuasion, and must link them to strategies appropriate to situation and purpose.
20 English in Urban Classrooms
To this extent, the rhetor is an improviser (albeit an improviser whose performance
is based on an existing repertoire of communicational devices) so that improvisation does not imply an absolute freedom of choice. On the contrary, the rhetor’s
strategies are subject to the constraints imposed by situation and audience.
Contemporary reworkings of rhetorical theory (Freedman and Medway 1994)
identify the patterning of the rhetor’s utilization of resources and responses to
constraint. In doing so, they produce a social typology of rhetoric – that is to say,
they link particular formal characteristics of language and communication to
particular social situations, in order to argue that particular kinds of situation tend
to elicit particular communicational forms. In this way, it becomes possible to
provide a relatively full explanation of the choices that a rhetor makes.
This is our ambition too. We aim to identify, analyse and explain typical curricular and pedagogic forms of secondary-school English, as they are actualized by
teachers. Following Halliday (1985) we understand these forms in relation to a
dual function: they attempt to convey ideas, in the broadest sense of the term, and
they seek to manage interpersonal communication. We aim to explain how in
terms of both these functions, these forms are shaped and generated by the social
relations of the classroom and by the wider institutional pattern of resource and
constraint within which English teachers work. We thus hope to produce an
account of English written neither in terms of relatively abstract ‘paradigms’ nor
in terms of relatively context-free ‘practice’, but attentive, rather, to the regularities of the subject’s realization. We see our task in this book as one of achieving the
‘thickest’ possible explication both of the teacher’s communicational work, and of
its ‘determined’ character – that is of the social agencies that go into its making.
This is a complex task, to say the least, whose intricacies are explored in the chapters that follow.
Chapter 3
A new approach to
understanding school English
Multimodal semiotics
Introduction
A new approach
In the first chapter we sketched the broader social and policy framework in which
we set our attempt to understand English. In this chapter we provide a sketch of
the theory and methodology we used to look at and describe English as it was
being produced. This answers, we hope, the question of how our means of understanding and describing meaning-making differs from that of others who have
written on English, and, in particular, how it goes beyond accounts that have been
based on speech or writing alone. We have already mentioned the term
multimodality several times, as a means of seeing meaning in visual displays, in
classroom layout, in the voice-quality of the teacher, in diagrams and wall
displays, in students’ posture, just as much as in what is said, written and read.
Multimodality is based on the assumption that meaning is made through the
many means (we call these modes) that a culture has shaped for that purpose; and
we think that these are used to fashion the meanings of English curriculum and
pedagogy no less than elsewhere, even if this is achieved differently. However, we
are clear that we need to set such descriptions and analyses within theories of social
explanation in the way begun in the previous chapter.
We think it is most useful to start straightaway with a demonstration of our
methodology; on the one hand it shows what our approach is like, and on the other
hand it begins to indicate what our methodology does reveal. Our aim is to understand how English comes to be ‘produced’ in the interaction of a multiplicity of
(social) factors at work in the classroom. To do so, we need to connect issues of
policy and social context, the characteristics and policies of urban multicultural
schools, teacher formation and tradition, the ethos of English departments, and the
political and institutional changes of the past decade with the issues of micro-level
classroom interaction. All shape what English becomes in a specific site, and how
it impacts on students’ experiences of English and of learning English. However,
the task of establishing a connection between this range of factors, and their actualization in multimodal form – the linking of macro-level social and policy factors
and micro-level features, such as classroom practices of all kinds – is not at all
straightforward.
22 English in Urban Classrooms
A specific example of the kinds of question we have in mind here might be:
‘How does a change, say, in policies around “selection” reflect itself, how does it
“show up”, in aspects of the English curriculum or in its pedagogy?’ To establish
the possibility of such a link we draw on semiotic theory and in particular on a
social theory of ‘sign’. Semiotics is the discipline that concerns itself with meaning
of all kinds, in all forms, everywhere. Sign is the central concept of semiotics; it is
an entity in which meaning and form have been brought together in a single unit –
of signified and signifier, to use the technical terms – seen, always, as reflecting the
meanings of those who make the sign. This relationship between social environment, signs, and the agency of those who make signs in the production of English
are explored in all of the chapters that follow.
Policy is articulated in discourses of various kinds – of targets and attainment, of
ability and achievement, of economic utility and cultural value. But it is only in
their articulation as signs that discourses become ‘visible’ and effective. Signs are
always multimodal and each modality brings the possibility of expressing and
shaping meanings. A poster, part of a display on a wall for example, is a complex
of signs: it may be a student’s handwritten text, left with spelling and grammatical
slips, rather than the word-processed writing of an official document, carefully
edited, mounted on board rather than pinned up, laminated maybe, displayed in a
prominent position or perhaps somewhere barely noticeable. When we look at
such a poster-sign, the many meanings made as signs in the various modes are
there in the one complex multimodal sign. The question is then how such
complexes of meaning realize different aspects of the social life of the school, and
that is discussed in many of the chapters following. In the example just given (a
real instance from our data) each of the modal choices makes meaning and realizes
a specific discourse among the many that are active in schools. For instance, how
students’ work is valued is lodged in a specific discourse around what it means to
be a student; whether spontaneity counts more than careful work invested in
editing is lodged in an educational discourse around learning, creativity, innovation, itself maybe part of a discourse around notions of human subjectivity. And
the prominence given to student work may point to discursive contestation over the
‘weight’ to be given to students’ agency relative to the demands of performativity,
and so on.
Taking a multimodal look
The data from our research project (together with our experience of the subject as
teachers, teacher educators and researchers) suggests that English, in contrast to
other core subjects in the curriculum (such as science and mathematics), is unusually diverse in its appearance from one classroom to another. Yet despite the many
differences between the lessons that we observed, each lesson remains clearly
identifiable as an English lesson. This raises two questions, one which we do not
set out to answer (‘So what is English?’) and one that is the focus of this book,
which here we can formulate in this way: ‘What is the cause of such differences in
A new approach 23
the appearance of English?’ After all, at the time of writing in 2004 there has been
a National Curriculum for some ten years, which has specified quite closely what
the curriculum of English is. Our answer circles around the question ‘What are the
conditions in which English gets actualized, realized, “produced”, in all the variability that one encounters across classrooms, and how can we account for these
differences?’
Here we start by describing two brief instances of an English lesson. In both we
focus less on curriculum than on pedagogy, which we see as the enactment of
social relations in the (already and always anticipated) service of mediating
specific curriculum knowledge. Curriculum, by contrast, we take to be the social
organization of knowledge for a specific audience – school children – always with
the purposes of the school in mind; what Bernstein (1990) called the recontextualization of knowledge.
We use a number of descriptive tools. Here we start with the ‘look’ of the
English classroom, its layout and furniture, and how English happens in that. For
us, the look of the classroom is as significant – in principle at least – as are the
teacher’s and the students’ uses of gesture, the images displayed on the walls, or
indeed talk and writing for that matter, even if always differently so. Everything
that happens in and shapes classrooms is for us a realization of the meanings of
English. From the micro-level of specific instances of classroom interaction we
‘look out’ to the macro-level of government policy, for instance, and refocus our
analytical lens to provide social explanations to understand why English is realized
as it is in this specific classroom.
Pedagogies of English: two examples multimodally
described
We start our account with a description of parts of two lessons in classrooms in
two different schools. We give a fairly sparse account of these segments of the
lesson, and we provide a gloss on these as we go along, providing our sense of
what meanings may be at issue. In our description here we focus on showing how
pedagogy is made, actualized through different modes, in the two classrooms. So
in the account below we deal with several modes in turn, with the intention of
showing our methodology, our way of looking, in action.
Wayford School: John
The layout of the classroom
Before a teacher has even begun to speak, one foundational aspect of the meaning
of English is already present for students and teacher alike, namely the layout of
the classroom. The manner in which tables, chairs and desks are arranged distributes students and teacher into particular places, and into a frame of social relations
with each other. The teacher can arrange the furniture in various ways (in this
24 English in Urban Classrooms
school there is no departmental policy on classroom layout or wall displays), and
so in this case the room layout can be seen as an expression of the teacher’s
preferred spatial and social relations with the students. This spatial relation is a
sign made by the teacher to express his (in this case) sense of the social relation, of
the pedagogic relationship with the students, as well as his sense of how the
students might work with each other and with him. What is particularly significant here is that this aspect of the pedagogic frame for English is already present
and realized in a classroom when the students come into the room, each day, and
in the experience of the students (as of the teacher), it becomes so ‘normal’ as to
become unnoticed. It comes to be the way English – as social or pedagogic relation – is experienced, ‘naturally’.
In each of the classrooms that we visited the furniture was arranged differently,
and each of these arrangements placed teacher and students in different spatial, and
therefore social, relationships to each other. As we will show, this spatially realized pedagogic arrangement contributes to the shaping of English curriculum, in
this as in all classrooms, even if never straightforwardly so. While these spatial
arrangements never fully determine all aspects of the social/pedagogic relationships in the classroom, they are one part of their production.
As the lesson is about to start, and the students begin to arrive and take their
seats, the teacher, John, a man in his mid-fifties, is already in the room. The
everyday, absolutely commonplace and prosaic ‘journey’ of the students into their
usual ‘places’ in the room, is the starting point for our look at English.
This classroom is a rectangular space with the teacher’s desk at the front-centre of
the room, and six pairs of tables arranged in two ‘rows’ (see Figure 4.5 in the next
chapter, which focuses on classroom arrangements in detail). Four students are
seated at each table; the grouping at the tables is suggestive of a ‘participatory’ pedagogy, a sign of a ‘constructivist’ approach. However, this sign of a ‘discourse of
participation’ is set within an arrangement of the tables in two rows, which, starting
close together at the teacher’s desk, are angled away from his desk to realize a
perfect panopticon. That structure superimposes a different meaning: a sign of a ‘discourse of surveillance’ overlaid onto a sign of a ‘discourse of participation’.
The position of the teacher’s desk in relation to the panoptic arrangement of the
rows of desks is suggestive of a specific teacher–class relation – that of the teacher
who occupies a central position in the classroom and who teaches from the front,
able to survey all that happens. This combination of three discourses, the ‘participatory discourse’ of a pedagogy suggested by the table-grouping, the ‘discourse of
authority’ of a pedagogy suggested by the desk at the front, matched with the ‘surveillance discourse’ realized by the panoptically arranged rows, makes a complex
pedagogic sign. The former actualizes a meaning of mutual construction; the two
latter actualize different meanings of control. However, what actually takes place
in the classroom is different yet again. For most of the lesson the teacher makes no
use of this quite complex spatial/pedagogic sign, either in his actual positioning or
in his movement in the room as he teaches. During the lessons that we observed, he
rarely sat at his desk, or stood at the front-central position in the classroom.
A new approach 25
Instead, he paced in an arc that started from his desk and went to somewhat to the
left of the door along the wall on the right side of the classroom. The arc traced by
his pacing movement in effect reconfigured the classroom space yet again,
creating a boundary and barrier across the door of the classroom to the corridor
(see Figure 4.6) – a boundary that in effect he ‘patrolled’ by his pacing.
This movement transformed the classroom into a pedagogic space different to
the one indicated by the arrangement of the furniture. Neither his positioning nor
his movement made any use of the existing potential for surveillance of the
students; from any point on the arc the teacher could only see the faces of those
students seated on one side of either ‘row’. But it did require great bodily effort
from those students who were not seated facing him but who wanted to see the
teacher. They had to contort their bodies, twisting around in their seats in order to
face him. The students had to do the work and make the effort of maintaining ‘contact’, which the teacher’s movement and use of space demanded. The teacher’s
movement and his positioning both served to maintain his authority and reinforced
the separation of teacher and student space in the classroom. For instance, the
teacher never walked around in the space of the class, entering the space between
the ‘rows’ and tables. The teacher was only made ‘fully available’ to the students if
they actively worked at making it so – the students had to re-position their bodies
uncomfortably to engage with him.
If we treat space, disposition and movement in space as means for making
meaning, then we have here a complex and multiply contradictory sign of pedagogy, which is constantly re-enacted and imposed; and which requires real – and
uncomfortable – work from the students. The tables with the four students seated
around each table suggest a democratic, participatory pedagogy, and a
constructivist approach to curricular knowledge: it suggests that knowledge can be
produced by the students in the work of talk and discussion, out of their own
resources, augmented by the teacher. The panoptic arrangement of the rows speaks
of the teacher’s wish to ‘know’ fully, of his need for surveillance, a need to control.
The positioning of the desk at the front speaks of a transmission pedagogy, with the
teacher as authority. This complex and inherently contradictory structure lays
down one possible ground-plan for a pedagogy of English. Overlaid on this is the
structure produced by the teacher’s pacing; this could be seen as the classical Stoic
perambulation, with his pupils, of the philosopher (who, with a mind deep in
thought, produces and shares profound insights for those willing and able to attend
and comprehend as he paces up and down). Yet the fact that this stroll happens in
front of the (always open) door makes it at the same time into the patrol of a guard
who can expel and readmit – as we will show.
If we treat layout of the classroom as a text, we could, as with written genres, try to
invent a label to name the multiply ambivalent pedagogic relation produced by the
arrangement and layout of furniture, and the use and apportioning of space in this
class. Yet the label is less important than the recognition of the complexity of pedagogic forms produced here and the realization that this complexity is constantly
enacted through the spatial disposition of teacher and students in the classroom.
26 English in Urban Classrooms
The example shows the significance of the mode of spatial arrangement, and
supports our contention that it has a shaping effect not only on the pedagogy of
English, but on how English is experienced by students in the classroom. We will
now show how a multimodal approach shows (aspects of) this complex pedagogy
realized in other modes as well, in talk, gesture, gaze, writing, in visual displays
(on the walls of the room), and in body posture.
Movement of the teacher in the classroom
Movement has meaning. In the space of the classroom the meaning is produced in
the interaction of three factors: the teacher’s movement itself, the meaning of the
space in which the teacher moves (at the front, in between the desks), and
whether, how and where the students may move. For instance, in some of the
classrooms we observed, the room was arranged in such a way that there was no
clear ‘front’ or ‘back’; rather there was a space that all, teacher and students alike,
inhabit – even if not necessarily equally – and in which all can and do move. There
the space is, in some ways, everyone’s space; and that in itself serves to realize yet
another form of pedagogy. In other classrooms, space and its use is much more
strictly controlled. In each case meaning is produced.
Here, in our first example, only the teacher moves, except for some students
who are temporarily expelled from the class and then readmitted. The teacher
moves slowly, deliberately; occasionally he comes to rest – when he is ‘invigilating’ rather than teaching – from his desk. The path of his movement describes an
arc, between his desk and somewhat to (his) left of the door (which is always
open). It is the reason why we call his movement a ‘patrol’: it reconfigures or transforms the space into ‘teacher’s space’ and ‘pupils’ space’. In this classroom there
are several overlapping definitions of pedagogic space, indicated by the placement
of the teacher’s desk in relation to the rows of tables; and produced by the transforming action of the teacher in his pacing. The underlying configuration positions
the students in one way; the transformation of that configuration forces (some of)
the students into the contortion of their bodies to make it possible for them to
conform to the transformed configuration. In short, the pedagogy realized spatially
and in the teacher’s movement is multiply ambivalent, and contradictory.
Visual display
Broadly the same complex pedagogic discourse is realized in the visual displays
on the walls of John’s classroom. The contradictions appear through the manner
and the form of display, as well as through the choice of materials displayed.
Discursively it is again a mixture of ‘participation’ – realized through materials
that (might) link to the cultural world of the students – and of authority through
the simultaneous presence of materials from an elite culture. The visual display
can be understood as a sign of the teacher’s sense of what the domain of English
is: to account for the phenomena of the cultural world as defined here. Hence the
A new approach 27
visual display might seem to be more a statement about the curriculum than about
the pedagogy of English. Yet the display has a pedagogic force in the sense that
the content also gives expression to the social relations of teacher to students.
The display in this room includes a range of texts, from a wide range of sources.
There are ‘official’ texts such as policy documents, curriculum resources, examination questions, school homework clubs, and the school timetable. Alongside
these, ‘unofficial texts’ are displayed – photographs of students reading, a handwritten poster on how to analyse a poem, and a few student poems. The visual
display also includes posters from London art galleries, film posters, posters of
poetry publications and several articles from magazines and broadsheet newspapers. That is the world which defines what English is and which English must
explain.
The texts that come directly from the world of the teacher are displayed on the
walls behind the arc traced by his movement. These are texts of ‘high-culture’ –
English art and canonical English poetry. The texts made by the students are
displayed on the wall at the back of the room. The texts that bridge these two
spaces consist of ‘official’ texts: National Curriculum policy and resources; for
example, a photocopy of the National Curriculum grade system for all areas of
English (literature, reading, and so on) is displayed in full, detailing the grading
criteria and the marking code. Displaying this text can be read both as a display of
the (source of the) authority of the teacher – legitimating his marking for instance –
and as a move towards transparency by making this information openly available
to his students, in a desire for democratic participation. There is no attempt by the
teacher to mediate these official – densely printed and photocopied – policy documents for the students. We think that this realizes the contradiction at the base of
his ‘participative-authoritarian pedagogy’. The information is present, there, on
the wall, and yet it may well remain inaccessible to the majority of students, unless
they are able and willing to work hard at making sense of it.
The (National) Curriculum itself is not foregrounded; it exists in the space
between the display of the teacher’s valued texts and those of the students. The
teacher and the official National Curriculum speak with different voices – they
remain distinct, and, as far as the display indicates, the teacher’s voice is dominant.
For instance, his casual, spontaneously handwritten sheet on how to analyse poems
is pinned over the top of the document setting out the National Curriculum criteria
for writing. The official text is effectively obliterated by his ‘poster’. And yet the
contrast between the hard, shiny permanence of the laminated official curriculum
text, and the dull yellow of the sugar paper of the teacher’s text, serves to create a
tension between the two, which brings both into play. The work of the teacher is
overlaid on the official curriculum text, whose edges, visible below it, form a
frame for the method advocated by his poster. So, spatially and visually, the work
of the teacher is located in the context of the official curriculum, it ‘rests on’ its
authority, and yet, literally, in the manner and mode of this display, it places itself
above it, as a challenge to it.
28 English in Urban Classrooms
Speech
In our theoretical approach speech is the name of the mode, the meaning-resource,
and talk indicates a particular social use of that resource.
The teacher’s talk embodies the contradictions that we have described; it too
realizes the same ‘authoritative/participatory’ pedagogic discourse, with its
constant structure of affirmation of one kind of relation that is simultaneously
negated/contradicted by its opposite. A somewhat superficial and commonsense
description of the characteristics of John’s talk would be this: his voice is soft, low,
friendly, at times bordering on the ‘familiar’. The grammar and syntax are those of
‘indirection’; that is, commands are ‘disguised’, not given using the direct, usually
imperative form. For example: ‘I would like everyone to be reading silently for
about five/ten minutes, please’ (syntactically a declarative; semantically a statement; but pragmatically, in its illocutionary force, a command) rather than
‘[Please, everyone now] read for five minutes’. Similarly, rather than saying ‘read
with a pencil [for annotation] in your hand, please’ John said ‘if you’re reading
with a pencil in your hand that’s pretty sensible’, and ‘people who are looking at
Superman, you might be thinking about this’ (rather than ‘read with a pencil in
your hand’ syntactically an imperative, and semantically/pragmatically a
command), and so on. Indirection of this kind is a sign of power, namely the power
to force those who are addressed to do the work of interpreting the message
correctly.
The teacher operates a reward scheme in the class, in whose operation ‘indirection’ and ‘implicit criteria’ are entirely merged: neither the principles for the award
of points (nor the quantity awarded) are usually made overt. So we have ‘Prince,
could you have five points please?’ (syntactically an interrogative, semantically a
question, but pragmatically a command: ‘Prince, take five points!’), ‘Lawrence,
you can have five points’ said without any explanation, and to another child ‘that’s
very interesting, that’s very clever, that’s five points’.
The authority, the source of knowledge and the point of reference, are generally
the ‘I’ of the teacher: ‘I’m not at all pleased’, ‘I would like everyone to be reading’,
but it is not an ‘I’ that reveals the principled grounds of its authority, or of its
knowledge. The principles are portrayed as though they might not even be available to the teacher himself: ‘I’m thinking maybe … is it that…?’ as if he, and
maybe he and the students together, are producing these insights into English in
difficult, inspired labour, here and now.
That is, the pedagogy embodied in the form of John’s talk, in the quality of the
voice as much as in the syntax and texture of his speech, shows the same
complexity and contradictions as we have shown in the layout of the room and in
his movement. It is simultaneously a disguise of power and its assertion; an implicitness of statement and an expectation of understanding what is at issue. In other
words, what the form of talk suggests is a world in which directness is not the
normal mode of operating; rather it suggests that there is a cultivated, cultured
sensibility that makes such (indirect, implicit) understanding and knowledge
A new approach 29
self-evidently available, accessible to those who are ‘a proper part’ of this community. Such understanding cannot be made available through direct, explicit, overt
teaching; it can only be modelled, in the allusive manner in which it is here made
available. That, it seems to us, is the significant aspect of English pedagogy here; it
is at the same time a potent content and meaning of English itself.
Gaze, gesture and embodiment
Through most of the lesson (and certainly in this segment) the teacher does not
really look at the students. Even when he addresses a student directly through talk
he does not often look at her or him. The exception to this is when a student is
admonished or about to be punished: teacher, hands on hips, looking at Kamala
(who is putting on make-up): ‘I’m not at all pleased; you had break-time to do that
kind of stuff’. The more usual disconnection between the person who is addressed
and direction of his gaze is another realization of the ‘split’ pedagogy. The
students are addressed via talk (in contrast to some other teachers in our data-set,
who use gaze as a means of address). For this teacher the task of management of
the classroom is done via talk; it is something to be accomplished in order to let
the teaching happen. He would, literally, rather not look at it. The real task is
handled by his gaze, which ranges ‘over’ the class and beyond it: it is in gaze that
we see the development, unfolding and communicating of the curriculum of
sensibility. That is a task which is ‘above’ the plane of classroom management;
and perhaps it is not even meant for real people actually there as members of the
class, but a task somehow ‘above’ all of them. When he awards the five points to
Lawrence, for instance, his hand touches the student’s shoulder lightly as he says
‘Lawrence you can have five points’; his gaze, however, is directed away from the
student.
A typical gesture (and accompanying facial expression) used by this teacher is
that embodying the attitude of the now puzzled, now anguished intellectual. He
holds his right hand to his mouth or chin (with the elbow cradled in the left hand),
in a thinking pose, while one of the students says ‘cos she’s normally … cos I think
she sees the world as fiction, like’. He responds ‘That’s very interesting, that’s
very clever, that’s five points’. He moves to a new gesture where he holds his right
hand up, forefinger touching thumb: ‘That’s very clever: she’s seeing the world
like a fairy tale’, and he continues to hold this gesture, as though carefully holding
a small, valuable and fragile object.
In general John uses gesture (when it does not represent and communicate his
puzzled or anguished attitude) to handle those aspects of his interaction with the
students which he does not do with his gaze, and which are not fully done with his
talk. These gestures indicate ‘receiving of information’, ‘astonishment at the information’, and are used as a kind of ‘conducting’ of the interaction, often
achieved by means of the duration and ‘holding’ of a gesture.
All this provides the effect of embodiment: that is, the meanings made in the
mode of gesture are, as it were, meanings in the body of the teacher, just as the
30 English in Urban Classrooms
effects of his positioning, movement and use of gaze have the same force. In this
manner, English and its meaning seem to be held in, displayed by, actualized
through the body of the teacher: English is the teacher; the teacher is English. This
is an effect that we think is not characteristic of other subjects in the school
curriculum.
Voice quality
In and through voice quality (van Leeuwen 1999), the teacher performs and realizes sensibility and sensitivity. This, too, has pedagogic significance: the meaning
of a social relation in which explicitness is inappropriate, in which directness
would be too ‘heavy’ for the gossamer lightness of what has to be communicated,
where to be explicit would be gross and mundane.
If pedagogy is an effect of and the actualization of social relations, then this is a
pedagogy communicating that in English direct expression or explicitness –
whether it is about content or about the means of communication – is simply inadequate to achieving such fragile aims. In this, too, voice quality represents, realizes
and communicates the form of pedagogy that we have described so far.
So far we have tried to avoid direct comments on curriculum, though that has, at
times, proved impossible. As we will say at different points throughout the book,
English remains, for a number of reasons and despite the attempts of policy, a
subject with a weakly explicit curriculum. In its implicitness, much of what
English is and does is precisely about forms of social interaction and ‘social
being’; it is and remains still the domain of subjectivity and of identity of a certain
kind, although it is by no means the case that this is equally so in all of the nine
classrooms that we visited. Yet pedagogy and curriculum are very often too close
to disentangle, in ways that are not so in other subjects. In science the two are
distinct: here is the curriculum (in a way that would vary little from classroom to
classroom), and here is the pedagogy as the means I use to communicate it (which
can vary from classroom to classroom). By contrast we can say that in several of
the English classrooms, pedagogy as social relations was realized, at least in part,
through aspects of curriculum.
This situation poses real difficulties for students in a multicultural, multi-ethnic
classroom and society. It becomes very much a question about access and equity
when curriculum is, or is made available as, pedagogy as social relations. Inevitably some forms of pedagogy are ‘closer to’ the forms of social relation of the
cultures of some members of the classroom than of others.
Ravenscroft School: Irene
In the first example we looked at the beginning of a lesson; now we show an
extract some little way into (a series of lessons and) one particular lesson. We
demonstrate the same multimodal methodology at work in the discussion of the
‘core’ of a lesson rather than in its initial framing. Although curriculum is here
A new approach 31
more an issue, we still want to continue with our focus on pedagogy. Although
this example involves a different set of issues, we continue to focus on the same
modes; nevertheless here our methodology brings different issues into focus. We
hope that the contrast gives a better sense of our way of looking – which is our aim
in using these two contrasting examples.
To make comparison and contrast easier, we use the same headings as in the first
example, and we depart from them only where the material itself suggests that we
should. So here, for instance, it becomes necessary to speak about the students’
posture as significant and meaningful; and this allows us to reflect on the first
example to see whether posture might have been significant there.
The layout of the classroom
This classroom is arranged in what is now called a traditional form: the teacher’s
desk is at the front, the students sit at desks that are arranged in rows, by and large
all facing the teacher, Irene (see Figure 4.12). In the disposition of chairs and
tables there is no suggestion of pedagogy of ‘democratic participation’, nor of
‘constructivism’ in relation to the curriculum. This classroom layout signals
‘transmission pedagogy’: the teacher is positioned as authority, and the students
as the recipients of knowledge, explicitly provided, by the teacher. From the
layout it seems that there is none of the complexity, contradiction and confusion
of the classroom in the first example.
The teacher’s desk is at the front, and beside it, on the wall behind her, is a
whiteboard that she uses throughout the lesson. The arrangement of the room
provides and realizes a pedagogy: this is a pedagogy in which authority relations
are clear; power lies with the teacher, and students are recipients of knowledge. We
might call it a ‘pedagogy of authority’.
Movement of the teacher in the classroom
Given how the classroom is arranged, this teacher’s scope for movement is
circumscribed compared to our first example. It is she who has arranged the classroom in this manner and, clearly, movement in the way that it appears necessary
for the first teacher is not what she wants. She has a different sense of the classroom space and of its pedagogic potentials, and her classroom is arranged to allow
her to realize her sense of the pedagogic relations.
This is not to say that this teacher does not move. At times she sits at or behind
her desk (a table like the other tables in the room, with a chair like the others behind
it). At times she stands up, slightly behind and to the side of the chair, at times she
moves slightly to her left in order to write or draw on the whiteboard, or to gesture
at it. The most significant movement is when she moves quite some way, maybe
three steps to the right of her desk, so that now her relation to the (centre) of the
class is no longer directly ‘front on’, but somewhat ‘side on’. If the meaning of
being at the centre-front is that of ‘direct involvement’ (with a group a person or an
32 English in Urban Classrooms
object), then the move to the side suggest a less direct involvement, maybe a
certain detachment (see Kress and van Leeuwen 1996). At that point she also, at
times, half-sits on the edge of a table that is there.
Her movements in the classroom space are much less pronounced than John’s, in
terms both of the distance that she moves and of the pace, frequency and regularity of
her moving – she definitely does not ‘pace’ up and down. Her movement doesn’t
transform the classroom in a radical way, even though her movement to the side does
change the authority relation somewhat. What does happen is that the ‘genre’ of the
interaction changes. So when she half-squats on the edge of the table, she assumes
the role of chat-show hostess, not directly involved yet not marginal to the action
either. This produces a meaning of an active audience debating an issue of concern to
them. That change in genre was not an effect of the teacher’s movement in the first
classroom. But here it can produce a switch in formality, even though what is
teacher’s space and students’ space is clear and remains stable.
Yet, pedagogically speaking, while there can be change in the pedagogic relations in this classroom, in the genre of classroom interaction, there is no sense of
contradiction, of tension, or of the overlaying of fundamentally incompatible
pedagogic forms.
Visual displays
The form, and the clarity, of the pedagogic relations is also signalled by the form
of the visual display in the classroom. The ‘visual layout’ of the display is careful:
it is precisely aligned and linear or rectangular. The displayed elements are all
carefully produced, rectangular, framed and laminated. Its content is student
writing, word-processed and neatly framed on a background of cardboard, and
there are book covers of ‘good-quality’ literature read by the students. What is
displayed is either that produced in the classroom – poems, book reviews, essays –
or as the result of work done previously in the classroom. What is shown as valued
in this classroom is on the one hand the students’ own work, treated seriously, and
valued texts as entities in the curriculum. Both in the choice of texts that are
displayed, and by the value with which they are endowed or imbued through the
preparation and care of display, the teacher’s social and pedagogic relation to the
students is clearly realized: students and their work are valued; the teacher
bestows the valuation.
The conception of English here is clear, at least in one sense: English is that which
happens in this classroom; it is ‘good writing’, whether that of the students or that of
valued literature; it is demonstrated by the achievements of the students themselves.
There is consequently a much greater uniformity and clarity on this matter.
Speech
Syntactically and grammatically this teacher’s talk in the classroom is direct:
questions appear in the form of interrogatives, which is the direct, ‘unmarked’,
A new approach 33
syntactic form for a question. So, for instance, when discussing a text she said:
‘What is the major revelation in this story?’; ‘What’s the thing that we discover?’;
‘What happens towards the end, when the wedding celebrations are coming to an
end?’, and so on.
Similarly, commands are given in the form of imperatives, also the unmarked
form: ‘Put your hands up’; ‘Somebody else read out’; ‘Keep your hands up, keep
your hands up’. Statements (in the syntactic form of declaratives) are used by this
teacher to state things – things that she judges significant: ‘And then we have this
revelation’. In other words, the use of syntax in talk is as straightforward, as direct
as her use of other modes. ‘What you see and what you hear is what you get’ we
might say.
This linguistic disposition extends to a somewhat more abstract issue, one which
in this series of lessons straddles pedagogy and curriculum, namely the switch
between ‘this is a literary text, to be discussed as “literary text”’ and ‘this is a text
that is about life, and needs to be related by me and you to your lives’. So for
instance: ‘Mmm, it’s like women and men. Men can feel free to talk about your …
their conquests’. Here the switch in pronoun indicates that difference. At this point
in the lesson, the teacher still wants to keep this text as the literary text, not yet as
the text of life, which is where she intends to go with it; it is that which motivates
her recasting, the switch from ‘your’ to ‘their’.
Gesture, gaze and embodiment
Throughout the lesson, the teacher holds her body in an upright posture, whether
sitting or standing; it is a posture that conveys an attitude of authority, confidence,
stability, ‘settledness’. This strongly suggests one form of the pedagogic relation
that she has with the class: she is there as a source of knowledge and authority.
This is a constant throughout the lesson, and mediates her relation to the whole
class. Gesture is used pedagogically, in selecting students, in subduing others, in
reinforcing what is being said, and in keeping ‘the floor’ free for a particular argument – whether for herself or for the students she chooses to act as her
spokespersons. And as we will discuss in another chapter, the teacher uses gesture
for curricular purposes.
This teacher, Irene, uses gaze in what we shall frequently refer to as orchestration. She uses gaze where the teacher, John, in our first example used talk – as a
means of (classroom) management – except that here management is much more
than what is usually understood by that term. She selects those students with whom
or through whom she wishes to advance the argument of the lesson through gaze;
equally, those who are asked to remain silent for the time being are discouraged by
not receiving her gaze, or by being ‘held at bay’ through a gesture.
Unlike John, the teacher in our first example, Irene uses gaze very much to
engage with the class and individuals within it. Again, there is no contradiction: no
verbal address or nomination of one student while the teacher’s gaze goes somewhere else entirely. In this respect the clarity of the social–pedagogic relation is
34 English in Urban Classrooms
also reinforced and realized in the use of gaze. This is in tune with Irene’s use of
syntax that we commented on just above. Gaze is used as a means of social interaction, of control, but in an unambiguous manner.
What is embodied in these lessons is a sense of how English is to be handled in a
frame of specific clear social relations, where the teacher is a point of stability, of
authority, and the students are valued in their rights through what they do and say.
What is embodied here is English pedagogy as pedagogy; what is embodied in our
first example is English pedagogy as the content of English, as curriculum.
Voice quality
The teacher speaks quite slowly throughout, she speaks very clearly and audibly,
strongly and deliberately: what she has to say is given weight by all aspects of the
quality and her use of her voice. Her voice is a clear sign of her authority. She has
something to say that she regards as significant, and her voice signals that; she is
the person in authority, and her voice signals that also.
Students’ posture
We made no overt comment on the students’ posture in the discussion of the first
classroom, other than where the contortions of some of the students’ bodies
seemed an effect of the teacher’s actions; it did not seem to be a resource made
available for meaning-choice by the students. In our first example, the teacher
commented frequently on the students’ posture, in order to ‘correct’ it. In this
second example the students’ posture appears as a meaningful action. The
students sit at tables arranged broadly in (three) rows; each student sits at one
table. This arrangement of the tables creates a particular relation of student to
student – each student ‘has’ her or his ‘own’ table, and this provides a different
structure of potential interaction between them: not co-construction of knowledge, but equality in being members of an audience that receives knowledge
from the teacher. The relation of each student to the teacher’s table or desk is also
clear and constant.
The classroom layout does not speak of ‘participation’ in the construction of
knowledge, nor is there any sense of equality between teacher and students.
However, what is immediately noticeable is that the students feel free to ‘lounge’
or ‘sprawl’ across ‘their’ tables. In other words, here there is a contradiction: it lies
in tension between the authority relation suggested by the strict order of the layout
of the classroom, and the freedom permitted to the students as to how to comport
their bodies individually. In the first classroom there was a constant censuring
effort by the teacher to control the students’ posture with a variety of reasons given
(for example, the teacher frequently comments on the need to sit up straight to
avoid ‘cutting off the supply of oxygen to the brain’). In the classroom discussed in
the second example, students are free to express their sense of participation or
distance in their bodily postures.
A new approach 35
Whereas in John’s classroom contradictions seemed to arise in all the meanings
or signs made by the teacher, in Irene’s classroom the contradictions lie between
the sign of a clear structure established by the teacher, and the freedom that she
grants to the students to transform that meaning by making their signs through
posture. In John’s classroom the students do not have that freedom; they are forced
to conform to the contradictory structures of the teacher, and are subject to his
disciplining of their posture. In Irene’s classroom there are clear structures of
authority, and the ceding to the students of the freedom to express their meanings
through posture. The contradictions of the first classroom are those produced by
the teacher, who expects the students to conform to them, somehow; here the
contradictions and tensions arise from the fact that there are differences between
teacher/authority and student/agency, and these differences are recognized and
allowed to be given expression.
A provisional summary
Our examples show how the teacher in each classroom has orchestrated a range of
modes to construct a set of social relations, a pedagogy in each classroom. In both
classrooms we argue that the effects of policy, of the social composition of the
school, of the professional formation of the teacher, can all be ‘seen’. In other
words, both the effects of external and internal constraint, and the effects of real
agency in making the meanings of English (pedagogy) are present.
The person of the teacher plays a role: Irene comes from a former background of social work with young people, while John comes from a traditional
English degree. Although the social composition of each school, and of their
immediate environment, seems at one level quite similar, they have clearly
constructed a different relation with their environment: for instance, and
among other things, through selection in the one case and its absence in the
other (though this would need to be stated and explored in much greater specificity than we do here). Of course, both schools operate under the requirements
of the National Curriculum.
What we notice, and it is something that will be a cautionary fact in our interpretation, is that the appearance and form of a single sign does not tell the whole story.
Take the sign of classroom layout: John’s classroom starts with a structure that
promises participation, but, in a variety of ways and through a variety of modes,
realizes one where close control and disciplining of all forms of students’ action is
the rule. The second classroom, Irene’s, starts with a clear structure of authority,
but allows the teacher to shift from interactional genre to genre, including genres
of real audience participation; it makes important concessions to the students,
giving them the freedom to make their meanings.
The meaning of any event or of any structure does not lie in the meaning of one
sign, but has to be seen in the complex meanings of a set of signs all read together.
Here, in Irene’s classroom, we can notice that there is a broad homology among the
signs made in the various modes: the meanings made in one tend to recur in the
36 English in Urban Classrooms
meanings made in another. For the students it is of course absolutely crucial what
signs are made, what signs are there to be read, transformed, and remade by them,
and, above all, how they are positioned in relation to these complex signs, given
their own specific and, as a group, diverse backgrounds.
Chapter 4
The English classroom as a
multimodal sign
English classroom as multimodal sign
Introduction
In the preceding two chapters we have looked at the broader environment of
schools, and of English, and we have provided a brief sketch illustrating our mode
of looking, our methodology. We turn now, in the following chapters, to explorations in greater detail of specific issues in order to build up a rich picture of the
complexity of the work that constitutes the production of school English.
School English is changing, and our research suggests that under the impact of
policy the English classroom itself is also changing, though not in a uniform direction. Each of the classrooms we discuss in this chapter was organized by the
teacher whom we observed in the course of our research, and the significance of
the classroom space to the teachers we watched and interviewed was always
evident. The design and displays of the English classrooms that we visited during
the research project, and the many more that some members of our team visit in
their role as PGCE tutors, varied considerably. These displays can be seen as one
material sign of the diversity of English. In this chapter we discuss this diversity by
looking at four classrooms, across the three schools. Our four examples allow us to
offer a social explanation of both historical change and current diversity, with a
particular focus on the changing role of government educational policy and regulation, and on the other kinds of agency that contribute to shaping the classroom
setting. We aim to show that the classrooms in which teachers and students work
play a key role in the shaping of pedagogy: the spatial organization and visual
displays of the classroom are central elements in the production of school English
and its social relations. We see the material aspects of classrooms as signs of the
pedagogy of English that a teacher has produced, and of the social and political
forces that stand behind its production.
A classroom of my own
Many urban schools suffer from a shortage of useable teaching space, and this
creates particular pressures on teaching there. One of the teachers at Wayford
School, Stephen, did not have a classroom of his own. His problems were
38 English in Urban Classrooms
exacerbated by the allocation of classrooms: he taught the Year 10 class we
observed on the seventh floor on Mondays, and on the second floor on Thursdays;
on Fridays he taught them on the fourth floor. This constant moving between
floors frequently resulted in his lessons starting late and in the students’ confusion
over which room they were supposed to be in. The practical inconvenience was a
problem, but the teacher faced a still more complex problem – how to teach
English without a sense of ‘place’. Two of the classrooms he taught in were organized by other teachers to actualize versions of English that focused on media
studies, a focus not shared by this teacher. The third ‘classroom’ in which he
taught was the school’s break-time canteen and snack area. In each of these spaces
the desks were arranged differently. In one, they were laid out in a horseshoe
shape; in another, ‘cabaret-style’ (with groups of tables each seating five or six
students); and in the third, desks were organized singly into three long rows. Each
of these arrangements placed teacher and students in a different pedagogical relationship to one another. Hence the relationships between Stephen and his students
were constantly being reconfigured, and they had to work to produce a space for
‘their’ English, often in opposition to the place in which they were located. They
were involved in attempting continually to ‘rewrite’ the pedagogical practices
encoded in the layout of classrooms, and in doing so they had to take into account
the socializing systems that were already established there (Larsen 2001). A
significant part of each lesson involved establishing a frame for what was to
happen, for what English was to be for a class that lacked a settled experience and
a material history of ‘being together’.
Pedagogy and the classroom
Lawn (1999) comments that many teachers, himself included, do not recognize
the impact of the classroom as a material environment on teaching. The classroom
– like any other physical, constructed site – is designed with built-in values and
purposes that contribute to shaping the work and behaviour of the teachers and
students who occupy it. Seaborne argues, in his history of the British school
(Seaborne 1977), that a building literally ‘makes’ the teaching method. Fiske
(1995) develops the argument further, suggesting that school architecture is
deeply rooted in nineteenth-century values and that the successful reform of the
educational system requires rethinking the design of schools and the overall
learning environment. For us, too, ‘the pedagogical order of the classroom is
mediated in its spaces’ (Grosvenor et al. 1999: XX), though our data suggests a
less emphatic approach than Seabourne’s: the classroom is a spatial resource that
constrains and enables different kinds of pedagogy rather than a force that
exercises a completely determining influence; as we pointed out in Chapter 3,
space is constantly transformed by those who use it. So our focus is not on the
designing of the school or classroom by government, local authority or – since
2000 – by private-sector company. Such design is influential, but not definitive.
Instead we explore the ways in which teachers, working in these already designed
English classroom as multimodal sign 39
spaces, shape and transform English: in one of the cases we discuss below, a classroom initially designed to abet a strongly didactic model of teaching, with pupils
arranged in neat rows of desks, is reshaped by the teacher to realize a radical
teaching environment in which students can challenge the authority of tradition.
Multimodality – the perspective that forms such an important part of our methodology – extends beyond questions of classroom layout. Most classrooms contain
one form or another of visual display. Display is often discussed in terms of the
ways in which it might create an attractive environment for learning – an environment that reflects student interests, communicates ideas, provides materials for
teaching, creates a sense of place, rewards or recognizes pupil work and contributes to a work ethos (Williams 1989). From another more critical perspective,
display can be charged with naturalizing the classroom environment and with
making opaque the exercising of power (Foucault 1991). Our starting point is
different, in a way that we hope avoids either too great an emphasis on a celebration of display as worthwhile pedagogy, or too immediate an assumption that the
visual elements of the classroom can be linked to issues of authority and power.
For us, spatial organization and display are aspects of a design for English, developed within a specific set of social relations. They are the products of living labour,
doubly made by their originator (pupil, artist, printer, and so on) and by the teacher
or teachers who produced their current spatial arrangement and textual environment in which the initial text is relocated. As the product of the work of teachers,
classrooms display outcomes of labour that has been performed out of hours. But
the displays and arrangements of the classroom do not remain as an ‘inert’, ‘precreated’ background to the work of a class: they are activated, or reactivated, by
classroom pedagogy. In this respect, the teacher’s role is central: the teacher mediates what is displayed and what is enacted in the classroom; it is the teacher who
connects the spatial material display of English to other aspects of the subject’s
realization. In this sense, classroom arrangement and display provide pedagogic
resources; they are part of the technology of teaching and serve to transmit to
students the pedagogic practices and ‘fundamental regulatory principles’ that
govern a school (Daniels 2001: 169). Displays, activated by the teacher, relay the
regulatory framework of the curriculum, and the criteria that are taken to signify
appropriate learning within a school, and they socialize students through their
activity into the expected competencies of a classroom and the teacher’s desired
models of good practice. Visual displays and the arrangement of the classroom are
thus a ‘pedagogic tool’, a medium to communicate the qualities and expectations
of the teacher or school in a language that is to be lived as an identity-building and
identity-confirming experience (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001). So teachers’ work
of display, and their reactivation of display through pedagogy, both legitimates the
work of students and draws them into pre-established systems for classifying
knowledge and skills. In some of the classrooms we observed, this was an explicit
aim of pedagogy: the classroom was understood and designed as an attempt to
broaden the knowledge base of the students – to increase their cultural capital. In
the course of this activity, there was revealed a tendency to replace, as a safeguard
40 English in Urban Classrooms
against examination failure, the uncertain labour of the students with the authoritative labour of the teacher. In what follows, we aim to explore in some detail the
workings of this process.
The changing English classroom
In order to be able to identify what is specific and new about the present ‘moment’
of English teaching, we start with a brief discussion of the classroom of the past,
turning first of all to the visual record.
There have of course been major changes in educational design, particularly
since 1944, which have impacted on the spatial arrangement of the classrooms and
the organization of their furniture (Maclure 1984): the classrooms of schools built
from the 1960s onwards are smaller; they have lower ceilings and more windows,
and therefore more light and a stronger (intended) connection with the community
outside the school. These changes can also be seen in classrooms built in a more
distant past, and later transformed through the addition of false ceilings and new
windows. The strictly ordered rows of single desks have been replaced in many
classrooms, although not all, with desks arranged into ‘dining-room layouts’ –
desks joined to seat small groups of students, and ‘cabaret-style’ arrangements in
which students are grouped around tables all facing the front (Waterhouse 2001).
The arrangements of tables into groups is a marker of a theoretical shift in conceptions of learning, in which student-centred ideologies have played a major part,
and in which the teacher has been redefined as a facilitator. Following Hamilton
(1989) we might see enacted here a shift from the values of mass production and
social efficiency to an agenda formed by a more diverse set of purposes. Certainly,
the spatial arrangements serve to change the relationships between teacher and
students, and among students themselves.
Visual display has also been transformed. Photographs of elementary- and
primary-school classroom walls in books documenting education in the early part of
the twentieth century (Bourne and Mac Arthur 1970; Grosvenor 1999) depict a
classroom world of dense visual display, including landscapes and portraits, scientific images and posters about language. It is difficult to reconstruct the purposes of
such display, but one might suggest that it was related in part to a project of ‘bringing
the world into the classroom’, combined with a more directly pedagogic project,
related, for instance, to communicating the rules of spelling and parts of speech. So
far as we can tell, the walls of postwar secondary education were somewhat barer. In
the English classrooms that some of us attended as grammar-school students, and in
which some of us taught in the comprehensives of the 1970s, English was modelled
as the product of an interaction of teacher, students and text, with visual display not
taking a significant pedagogic part. The most common practice was for the walls to
be used to display students’ ‘best work’. In some classrooms there would be some
teacher-supplied posters – gleaned for instance from the Royal Shakespeare
Company – or postcards from the world’s art galleries. Athena’s poster shops had
been established in the late 1960s, and the kinds of display found on the walls of a
English classroom as multimodal sign 41
student flat were carried over into the classroom. The anti-racist and feminist
moments of the 1970s and 1980s also found their way into English classroom
display – providing images related to ‘self-esteem’ and sometimes exemplifying
non-traditional Englishes. In addition, there were often examples of students’ workin-progress on display: teachers used the walls of the classroom as a working tool, a
visual space in which students and teacher could co-produce texts, stories and narratives as a reflexive tool for thinking and discussion.
The paragraphs above describe a history that has in some respects now taken a
new turn. Visually, the English classroom appears to be a denser environment.
Increasingly, it provides a resource for a new kind of pedagogy, at the same time as
it reflects the impact on schools of new forms of governance and accountability.
Pedagogically, visual display emphasizes to what is, historically, an unusual extent
the influence of official policies for the teaching of the subject – hence the presence
of extracts from exam syllabuses, guidance on grammar, exemplary work, and
commercially produced designs incorporating newly canonical poems. This material is part of an effort to make curriculum and assessment procedures explicit –
not so much in respect of an ‘inner logic’ of the subject, as in terms of a
performance-driven, exam-centred agenda.
Changes in forms of visual display have been accompanied by a different
approach to the layout of the classroom. The Key Stage 3 strategy’s pedagogic
recommendations of the horseshoe arrangement of classrooms can be seen as an
attempt by central government to exercise a more direct authority over the classroom. The horseshoe classroom embodies a pedagogy – teaching from the front
with a large element of whole-class work – that in its panoptical dimension relates
as much to the management of behaviour as to intervention in learning.
We must be careful, though, not to overestimate the extent of current change: it
is not as if each historical period breaks completely from those that preceded it.
Classroom arrangements and displays often appear heterogeneous, in that the
physical sediments of earlier practices coexist with the results of newer work. But
this heterogeneity is not accidental: the material environment of the English classroom offers insights into the relation between ‘old’ and ‘new’ and thus, also, into
the tensions and relations between educational policy and pedagogical practice.
Certainly, there is thus no single set of signs that convey an authoritative and
widely agreed meaning of English, and the English we encounter in these classrooms is a divided and complex practice.
Turning a multimodal lens on the English classroom
In order to explore the English classroom as a sign of English and a pedagogical
tool or technology we turn to social semiotics (see Chapter 1, and Hodge and
Kress 1988; Jewitt and Oyama 2001; Kress and van Leeuwen 1996, 2001).
Through our analysis we address three central questions. First, we examine the
texts, objects and furniture in the classroom and ask which domains of knowledge
the classroom displays represent to the students (and others) as a part of English.
42 English in Urban Classrooms
Is literature included, and if so what kinds of literature? What resources are the
students offered for their learning, and how are they positioned, physically and
conceptually, in relation to this knowledge? Second, we ask which representational and communicational modes are used to represent English, which modes
are used to explore aspects of English, which modes are foregrounded, and by
what means. Third, we focus on the arrangements and connections made between
these elements in the classroom to ask what is given importance or made central
through the resources of visual display and spatial arrangement. In short, then, we
approach the classroom as a complex multimodal sign of English. We draw on our
observations of lessons and in-depth interviews with teachers and students to
attempt to provide social explanations of these features.
While our analysis of these signs is, we think, plausible, we recognize that all
analysis is interpretation and our interpretation is informed by our social positions
as researchers. Signs are made in outward production – such as the layout of a
classroom, and also in inward production – as in the activity loosely called ‘reading’. In all signs people as sign-makers realize their own histories and interests.
Hence readings always differ, as we all bring our interests to the making of signs.
The teachers and students who inhabit the classrooms discussed in this chapter
brought their experiences, interests and interpretations to their classrooms, hence
their interpretation will, necessarily, differ from ours. In light of this we present
our analysis not as fact but as a hypothesis focused on the exploration of the
multimodal production of school English.
Springton School, Susan’s classroom: English as
competence in language communication
Susan’s classroom is typical of the other English classrooms in this school, in its
arrangement of desks, overall use of space and visual display. The uniformity of
the classrooms is a multimodal marker of a well-organized English department,
and of its ethos of sharing and co-ordinating the teaching and learning of English.
As Susan said when interviewed:
We have a very strong vision of how we want it [the English Department] to be
and it is the same, or very similar. We are trying to put that in place really. …
I think it is very, what I was saying, focused on English teaching. I think you
have to work as a team and that is quite a strong way of how I want things to run.
The school population, as described elsewhere, has a high proportion of students
with English as an additional language, a significant percentage of whom are at an
early stage of their language development in English, and a sizeable number of
students are refugees. English is taught to mixed-ability classes and teachers
differentiate within the class. Within the English department there is a strong
emphasis on group learning and the layout of each class reflects this. In each classroom the desks are arranged to seat groups of three to six students (see Figure 4.1).
English classroom as multimodal sign 43
The effective use of group work in the English department was singled out for
praise in a recent Ofsted report.
In this classroom, as in several others, the teacher does not have a desk and does
not occupy a fixed space in the room. The students’ seats are not arranged to position them in relation to the teacher’s gaze. While the concept of the classroom as a
cellular space positions the teacher as the authority (Peim 2001), the layout of the
furniture here does not emphasize this. In the lessons we observed the teacher at
different times taught from ‘the front’ of the classroom, sat amongst the students
and read from the board and overhead projector, and spent a significant amount of
time moving around the class to work with groups of students.
On walking into the classroom it was striking that there were few images among
the classroom displays; in the main, display material is written or typed, and
focused on concerns with language. The majority of the texts on display originate
from or relate to official texts, usually policy in the form of the English National
Curriculum. These official texts are given more importance than the other texts on
display through their prominent positioning on the walls. They include the
teacher’s mediated versions of the curriculum as instructions on how to write,
genres of writing, deadlines, examinations, and the criteria that must be met to
attain particular grades. A series of texts explains key words used in the Key Stage 4
examination papers I and II (Figure 4.2).
Through these texts the teacher has selected, adapted and transformed the
National Curriculum into a series of instructional materials for the students,
focused on the genre of examination. Resource cupboards, containing dictionaries
and thesauruses, run along one wall of the classroom. The texts displayed on the
doors of these cupboards (Figure 4.3) are resources for writing within the frame of
the curriculum: how to present a written text, phrases to use in the construction of a
written argument, starting a sentence, points on how to write for examination.
These texts act as an ‘extension’ of the cupboard’s contents.
There is one visual reference (Figure 4.4) to popular culture, in the form of stills
from Luhrmann’s film Romeo and Juliet (starring Leonardo di Caprio) provided
by the teacher to display the theme of masculinity in Romeo and Juliet and West
Side Story.
The work of students is displayed as work from across the year groups. This
display consists of terms from ‘media language’ – mis-en-scène and so on, alongside images from Luhrmann’s film. The display foregrounds the National Curriculum’s and the Literacy Strategy’s terminology for English, focusing on that which
is not known or rather that which is to be learnt; that which is beyond the everyday.
It acts as an exemplar and presents the teacher’s (now hidden)work through the
work of the students, as idealized student work. The still images are a visual annotation of the English/media studies entities.The use of these images in an otherwise
written environment serves to make this text stand out, to make it salient.
The position of the displays of student work on the ‘back’ wall, that is, away
from the activity of the teacher and the general gaze of the students, gives these
texts the least prominence in the room.
44 English in Urban Classrooms
Figure 4.1 Springton School: Susan’s classroom layout
English classroom as multimodal sign 45
Figure 4.2
Posters from Susan’s classroom that use key words from examination papers
Figure 4.3 Examples of the posters on the resource cupboard doors in Susan’s classroom
46 English in Urban Classrooms
Figure 4.4 Teacher-made text on ‘Masculinity in Romeo and Juliet’ displayed in Susan’s
classroom.
All of the texts on display in Susan’s classroom are neatly framed, as discrete
elements one from another, each text arranged in a strict vertical orientation; no
texts overlap. However, the texts are framed to different degrees. Those that relate
directly to the curriculum in the classroom are most strongly framed, through the
use of double mounting and colour. The use of mounting and colour makes
connections of ‘sameness’ or ‘of a sort’ between the texts that relate to the curriculum and to ‘instructions’ concerning how to write. The use of mounting, of
double mounting, and of colour is a visual actualization of the classification of
activities within the modular curriculum.
In addition to the framing for display, some texts are also framed by display.
These texts are arranged on the walls in positions that are further framed by the
furniture, or by spaces of the classroom such as cupboard doors, pillars, windows
or the whiteboard. This framing by display imbues the texts with different qualities
and relationships to the activities of the classroom. For instance, the whiteboard,
which is used by the teacher in each lesson and cleaned at the end of each, is the
place of current and changing information. By displaying texts on the frame of the
whiteboard the teacher positions them in the ‘here and now’ of the classroom: they
are literally framed within the activity of the lesson. The texts that relate to Key
Stage 4 examination questions are arranged as a series on a pillar between two
windows (Figure 4.2). They are framed both by the pillar and by the windows. This
English classroom as multimodal sign 47
vertical compositional arrangement presents them as a list – in the genre of ‘to do’.
The lack of framing of the texts on the resource cupboards can be seen as a visual
connection between the texts and the contents of the cupboards (Figure 4.3). The
teacher, Susan, said of these texts that they are ‘…the things I used to forget’.
The use of colour serves to connect and disconnect texts in the room: curriculum
is in a range of blues, and instructions are in red. The red frame around the entire
collection of student texts indicates that they are a set. The use of red to frame the
work of the students and the teacher’s instructions on writing in the classroom that
are displayed above the whiteboard serve to connect the ongoing activity of the
classroom. Colour and physical location are signs that position the displayed work
of students in a particular relation to the English curriculum.
The teacher’s combination of colour, framing, size, materiality and position
serves to make the teacher-produced texts more prominent than those made by the
students. The size, double-framing and colour collocation of the teacher-texts and
their salient position in the classroom give importance to the ‘official’ curriculum
in the classroom (Figure 4.4).
Discussion
The Springton School English department (of which this classroom is a typical
teaching room) is preoccupied, and not without reason, in getting students, mainly
from ethnic minorities, to perform well in GCSE exams. It thus assumes that it has
to privilege a particular version of ‘official knowledge’. In the process it conveys
to students that they are the sort of people who need a basic level of assistance to
cope with assessment demands. It provides in this sense an example of a strategy
for distributing what is ‘cultural capital’ in what are seen – in both economic and
cultural terms – as impoverished places. Distribution, in this context, involves
rationing. This is clear in Susan’s comments:
Well it [the student population] is diverse; a lot of students don’t read very
much at home. That is one of the major things and I think they need quite a lot
of support and you couldn’t just say ‘do this’ with any task. Every task has to
be broken down – you do lots of tasks to build up what you want to do – maybe
in a different type of school I think you would approach – you might get to the
text more quickly or something like that.
I suppose at Key Stage 4, unfortunately, it is quite exam orientated. I mean
I am, that is what those lessons are about really and I want them to know and
understand the poems that they are studying and to be able to kind of also
know what they need to do in an exam. I don’t really like that but I think I have
to do that – that’s what my role is.
Susan’s use of visual resources and her arrangement of these in the displays of
the classroom combine to produce English as a coherent, ‘boundaried’ and
univocal space filled with language. The dominant mode in this classroom is
48 English in Urban Classrooms
writing: the images of di Caprio, derived from popular culture, are in a very literal
sense cut down and tightly framed (Figure 4.4), so that the very thing that appears
to have engaged many young people in Luhrmann’s filmic reshaping of Shakespeare’s play – the display of masculinity (through the use of rap, dress, and
imagery of gang fighting) – is the subject of the teacher’s critique, and occupies a
minor position in a classroom that is a strongly ‘boundaried’ place – clear, sparse
and uncluttered, like the version of English that is produced there.
In this classroom ‘What English is’ is constituted as a completely explicit entity.
The curriculum is displayed, the language of examination is literally written on the
walls, the deadlines are clear. The politics of the English curriculum as articulated
in this classroom are ‘access to language’: language is, literally, made available as
a resource. English is about competence in written language. The pedagogy is
about the politics of equality of access. There is no wavering towards the pleasure
of the text, or the place of English in the world. In this classroom what English is
and how to teach it are certain. The dominant producer is the teacher. The dominant source is the National Curriculum. The content might change, from poetry to
popular culture, but the pedagogic frame will not. The desire for explicitness has in
this sense made the text an irrelevance.
The visual display of the classroom fits into an instructional genre. Policy in the
form of the National Curriculum is selected, condensed and strongly framed.
Everything else has vanished. The curriculum is so pervasive that it is difficult to
overlay it with anything. This genre of instruction positions the teacher and student
in a particular relation to the production of English, beyond the obvious power
relation that they are in. The teacher represents English as a series of competencies
that the students are to learn – the classroom display reminds them why they are
there and why they must work: they are to aim for the teacher’s idealized student
text.
Wayford School classrooms
Whereas Susan’s classroom is typical of all the English classrooms in Springton
School, there is no ‘typical classroom’ in Wayford School and for this reason we
discuss separately the classrooms of John and Lizzy (Stephen, as we discussed in
the introduction, did not have his own classroom). In the Wayford classrooms, the
arrangement of the furniture, the furniture itself, the visual displays, are all quite
different. The school has analogous organizational features: Lizzy, John and
Stephen all commented that there was no regular meeting of staff, and little
sharing of ideas, strategies and teaching plans within the department. When Lizzy
was asked about the ethos of the department she commented:
I think that is the problem: there isn’t a coherent ethos … There is a shared
ethos, which is about caring for the kids in a very kind of general way, but in
terms about an ongoing debate about learning and learning within English and
the best way to be planning for that and the strategies to use, it has become
English classroom as multimodal sign 49
very much each person does their own thing and there is very little coherent
discourse. There is not a departmental discourse about that.
The diversity of these classrooms is a material sign of the lack of a departmental
ethos in the school. In this context the classrooms are much more clearly the products of the individual teachers than is the case in our previous example. They also
serve as a material expression of teacher autonomy and power – a fact negatively
highlighted by the case of the classroomless Stephen, whose nomadic situation
was a factor in his eventual departure from the school.
John’s classroom: English as ‘embodied sensibility’
We introduced and discussed John’s classroom in Chapter 2, where we were interested in the contradictions and tensions created by the arrangement of the furniture and the teacher’s movement in this space. Here we return briefly to these
issues before discussing the classroom displays in more detail.
The room is arranged, as shown in Figure 4.5, in two angled rows of grouped
tables, each table seating four to five students. The teacher’s desk is positioned at
the front of these two ‘rows’ to make a panoptical arrangement.
The arrangement serves to position the teacher as an authoritative figure, able to
survey the students. However, the teacher does not teach from this position.
Figure 4.5
Wayford School: Photograph of John’s classroom layout (map in Figure 4.6)
50 English in Urban Classrooms
Front wall
File
cab
Desk and
computer
T’s desk
Back wall
Figure 4.6
John’s ‘arc of movement’ in his classroom
Instead, he repeatedly walks from the left of the door around his desk and to the
right in a curve, shown in Figure 4.6, and teaches mainly from a position near to the
classroom door.
In doing so he gives up the potential to make direct eye contact with all of the
students in the class, half of whom are seated with their backs to him. Unless they
turn to face him, which most do not, he has no eye contact with them. Through his
movement the teacher ‘divides’ the classroom space into two kinds of space: the
space of the teacher and the space of the students.
The walls of the classroom that correspond with this ‘arc’ (at the front and
beside the door of the classroom) are full of posters of films, art exhibitions, and
texts that mark the activity and interest of the teacher. These walls appear over time
to have come to ‘belong to’ the teacher, like a personal pantheon. The display of
curriculum and student-made texts occupy other walls in the room. There is no
merging of student with teacher texts; they remain distinct much in the same way
as they do in Susan’s classroom.
A number of art gallery posters, posters of English poetry, an ICT poster, a
newspaper article (‘paradise in the garden?’) and a map of the world are displayed
in the space used by the teacher during his teaching. These texts are all made
salient by being positioned around the blackboard and in the space of the teacher’s
activity. In this way importance is given to the sensibility of the teacher, and to
English classroom as multimodal sign 51
‘high’ cultural forms. The position of the art gallery and poetry-on-the-tube posters
high on the front wall (above the blackboard and the door) frame them as distinct
elements – quite literally out of the reach of the students.
Texts related to the official curriculum outnumber other kinds of text displayed
in this classroom; however, here these texts relay the curriculum differently from
those displayed in the classrooms of Springton School. While in Susan’s classroom the curriculum is neatly framed and re-presented to the students as ‘things to
do’, in this classroom, the teacher has not mediated those texts concerned with the
National Curriculum for the students. Official government texts include a photocopy of the National Curriculum grade system for all areas of English (literature,
reading, and so on). These are displayed in full, detailing the grading criteria and
marking code. Texts from official curriculum resources are also displayed,
including a Teachers’ Resource sheet relating to the analysis of a text, and a page
from an official anthology for students about ‘explaining the text’. In addition to
these photocopied texts two handwritten examination questions are pinned to the
board. Teacher-made texts include a series of photographs of students reading –
arranged around the pages of the National Curriculum dealing with reading, and a
handwritten poster on how to analyse a poem, stuck over the ‘criteria for literacy’
(Figure 4.7). On other walls there are a few student-made texts, all of them poems.
There are several film posters (of mainstream Hollywood and Bollywood) and
alongside these there are several articles from magazines and broadsheet
newspapers.
While the texts of the official curriculum outnumber the other kinds of text in the
classroom, they are made less prominent through their position in the classroom
than the texts dealing with art and poetry selected by the teacher. Several kinds of
‘official’ texts are displayed on the right and back walls of the classroom, placing
them in ‘the space of the students’. The curriculum is not foregrounded in the way
that it is by Susan (in the previous example). In the previous example the teacher is
‘fused’ with the curriculum – she speaks it, gives voice to it, through all her practices; she herself is backgrounded. In this classroom, the teacher and the official
curriculum have different voices; they remain distinct and the teacher’s voice
remains the most dominant. Having said this, there are only two teacher-made
texts: a handwritten A2 sheet on how to analyse a poem, written on sugar paper and
pinned to the wall, and a series of colour photographs of students working in the
classroom. These feature on the right wall (as seen from the door) of the classroom.
This is a point in the classroom that serves as a meeting-point between the space of
the teacher and the space of the students.
The teacher-made texts are made salient through their size and the use of colour.
The sheet on how to analyse poems is placed over the National Curriculum criteria
for writing. In effect, the official curriculum is obliterated by this ‘poster’, and yet
the contrast between the shiny permanence of the laminated official curriculum
and the dull yellow of the sugar paper serve to create a tension between the two
texts that brings both into play. The work of the teacher is displayed as overlaying
the curriculum itself. The edges of the curriculum frame this analysis: the
52 English in Urban Classrooms
curriculum of the teacher, present as his work, is clearly located within the context
of the official curriculum, and yet by its positioning it is a challenge to it. A series
of photographs of students reading newspapers (Figure 4.7) – leaning over the
texts but acknowledging the presence of the photographer – are displayed. These
images of students reading in the classroom frame the side and bottom edges of the
(EN2) curriculum document on reading. In other words, the images made by the
teacher are displayed in such a way that they are seen as being connected to the
National Curriculum – almost a realization of it.
The texts produced by the students have least prominence in the whole display.
They are few in number, positioned on the right and back wall, they are smaller in
size than all others, and show no or little use of colour. They sit quietly amongst the
noisy mesh of the texts that are, in one way or another, the teacher’s. The students’
texts have no teacher commentary. Their location – alongside the photographs of
students reading and of the official curriculum on reading – suggests that they are
there as a kind of visual evidence of students’ reading of such texts. Three student
poems are displayed in the classroom (see Figure 4.8). These focus on the issue of
identity (two focus on the loss of identity through language, and one on the
author’s bad behaviour at school). The teacher’s selection of these poems makes a
link between the student texts and the teacher’s selection of articles from broadsheet newspapers displayed. These focus on issues of identity (an article on refugees; ‘I wanted her dead’, an article on family relations; ‘When the lying had to
stop’, an article on (family) relationships; and ‘The men who make home hell’, an
article on domestic violence. The theme of identity is echoed in the film posters
among this display, which juxtapose posters for mainstream Hollywood and
Bollywood films. These posters do not relate to film adaptations of texts studied in
the curriculum (as was the case in the previously discussed classroom): they
connect with the world outside the official English curriculum.
The teacher’s framing of the texts in the display creates a physical and visual
web of connections between the (official and the teacher’s) curriculum and the
teacher, between the two curricula and the students, between the teacher and the
students, and between the students and popular cultural representation of identities. In this web of texts, the teacher’s framing of the three student poems stands
out. They are the only texts in the display that are framed by the use of backingpaper rather than by location alone. In other words, they are the only texts that have
been framed for display rather than by display. These framed poems make a ‘just
visible’ link between the order of the front wall and the web of connections on the
right and the back wall – maybe suggesting that there is hope after all of realizing
the teacher’s version of English. Their framing as texts-for-display indicates their
status as the products of English in this classroom, indicating their relation to
English ‘over time’ as they become covered and connected in the web of experiences of English here: they are a visual trace of the teacher’s idealized process of
realizing English.
Just like Susan, in Springton School, John uses the possibilities of spatial
arrangement as one means to mediate his sense of English in the classroom. He
English classroom as multimodal sign 53
Figure 4.7
Images of the curriculum on John’s classroom wall
54 English in Urban Classrooms
Figure 4.8
An example of a student text displayed on John’s classroom wall
does so less through his selection of texts than through the prominence that he
accords to his favoured texts, and through the subtle valuations expressed through
the connections between the texts. Where in Susan’s classroom there is an entire
sense of coherence around curriculum (though as we will show in later chapters,
this coherence is at times interrupted by some students) in John’s classroom there
is a loosely established sense of connection, differential valuation, and loose integration. It is English as and through ‘bricolage’.
John’s signs of English
The visual display and arrangement of John’s classroom realizes a different sign
of English to that of teachers in Springton School, particularly so in the role of the
National Curriculum. Whereas Susan clearly mediated the official discourses of
English this is not the case in John’s classroom. The fact that all the curriculum
criteria are displayed on the classroom walls suggests that this teacher is not interested in selecting, adapting or transforming in some other way the official curriculum: it is, simply, copied, and stands unmediated. The only form of mediation
occurs through its location among the other texts, which creates implicit and
ambivalent connections between the curriculum and the activity of the teacher
and the students. Neither the role of the teacher’s curriculum, nor that of the official curriculum is made explicit; both are, quite literally, ‘just there’, though
English classroom as multimodal sign 55
modally very differently there. Official policy is present in the classroom but not
prominently; it is overlaid with the teacher’s sense of English, and the shape of his
vision of the conflicts of the students’ lived identities with the requirements and
the value of schooling, which he expresses when he says: ‘English is the only
thing at the moment [in the National Curriculum] that really focuses on the nature
of how to get anywhere in society – it isn’t a question of just getting a grade.’
The texts displayed on the different walls of John’s classroom realize two signs
of English. The two signs of English are located in different spaces in the classroom. The first sign, English as high culture, is located on the front wall and round
to the side of the door (on the right wall). Our observations, and our analysis of the
video data, show that this area of the classroom is the ‘primary space’ for the
teacher in this classroom. The second sign, English as a web of references to identity and curriculum, is located on the right and back walls – the walls that ‘surround’ the students. There is a sense that the students are positioned as engaging
with texts but not as producing them. The work of English is engagement primarily
with written texts, all texts. This fits well with John’s comment on the role of
English: ‘The main thing we deal with through the stories is to do with the relationship between parent and children or adults and children and there is another theme
that goes through the other stories to do with becoming an adult, realizing what the
world is like, kind of thing.’
There are several posters on the windows along the left side of the classroom;
they are curriculum related (Shakespeare, for example) and appear to act as potential mediators between the two signs of English. The two signs together form a
complex third sign: ‘English as a perspective on life; English as a position in life’.
The display on the walls of the classroom can be read as the means for a
transformative journey toward English culture. This journey starts with a newspaper article about the experience of refugees; it links that to the English curriculum via student engagement with questions of identity through reading and
writing, through an understanding of film, and the analysis of all texts. This
journey leads to Shakespeare and to higher education, to travel in the world (the
map of the world), engagement with English poetry and art. English is life and
therefore school English is about the students developing an understanding of what
parts of life should be attended to.
Wayford had a low rate of achievement in examinations, together with a high
truancy rate and severe behaviour-management problems. It had a high percentage
of students on free school meals – a crude indicator of income – and a higher
percentage of students who had English as another language. In the classes that we
observed there was a lot of truancy. These problems greatly concerned John, and
shaped his idea of the purposes of English:
I have done the hippy bit. I have done waiting six months for the child to be
ready to write … this was in Australia in the 70s with 100 per cent employment and they could afford to waste their time and there was no national
curriculum so we did ‘wonderful things’ … [Now] I want children coming in
56 English in Urban Classrooms
to work, to do their best, to have sense of what their best is. To listen to me
when I speak. To listen to each other. To show respect to each other, to me, to
the subject. To understand what the assessment is, how you learn to ultimately
become independent learners who don’t need me. To kind of know how
education and learning works and then where it fits in to the scheme of life …
that language is power and knowledge is power – [being] able to use language
will get you power of the broadest possible sense – it will get you what you
want when you go to a meeting or see somebody – being able to go to a library
and use it; being able to speak in the right way at the right time to get your jobs.
It comes down to that. Power is the main thing. That is what I teach. How to
get power.
Alongside this backdrop of the potential of English to empower students, John’s
pedagogic strategy is one of high authority and control as we have seen; they are
present in his comments on his pedagogic style:
I use a combination of being very very hard and very very nice. I use charm a lot.
I also use raw naked power … I have order in the classroom. Everything is clear.
There is no discussion, argument, whatever. This is how it is and if you don’t do
it that way you are out. You are on time, you sit where I tell you to sit and take
your coats off … The weight of a school is always greater than any child.
I have just started doing points and the thing is it is essentially based on
reward but it is also based on gamble because it is not consistent and so it is
even more evil than just giving them a reward because they don’t know after a
while when they are going to get the points and after a while they don’t care
anyway.
Alongside this focus on authority and behaviour John comments on the need to
maintain a ‘sense of excellence’ and to identify and foster the ‘talent’ of students:
If they are dropping out a lot I don’t want them there and I make it difficult so
that they either come regularly or they don’t come. I know that is not the solution for them but it might be the solution for the others. I would prefer to have
18 or 20 students being as successful as they can be than 15 being successful
because I am spending too much time with the people who aren’t coming …
It’s kind of recognising, really recognising, talent when you see it and that is
something you actually have to go out and look for a bit because it is easy not
to see.
Stepping outside the immediate frame of our project, we might see in this
teacher’s practices the response to the deep contradictions that mark contemporary
society, so well described in the writings of commentators on contemporary social
life (such as Beck 1992): the wish for order and authority, for clear ethical and
aesthetic frames, matched with a recognition of the ever-increasing individuation
English classroom as multimodal sign 57
of humans brought by the harshly insistent demands of the new forms of the
economy, of the market in its present form. We have no doubt that this teacher
wishes to do what is best for the students in his class, as in her very different way
does the teacher in our first classroom. Both are faced with irreconcilable tensions,
conflicts, contradictions beyond the school; each attempts to do what each sees as
professionally and ethically possible and necessary. In this classroom two strong
discourses are present as a resource for dealing with these momentous problems.
One is the older discourse of stable ethics and a settled aesthetics, of the development of an individual with a certain ‘sensibility’. The other discourse is the new,
the more recent governmental discourse of English as a powerful tool in the
shaping of new subjectivities fit for the new economy, marketed as the road to
authority, power and participation.
Lizzy’s classroom: English and the life worlds of students
In terms of visual display and spatial arrangement, Lizzy’s classroom differs
significantly from John’s room, from other classrooms we saw in Wayford School
and, in fact, from all of the classrooms in our study. Nonetheless, her room
(Figure 4.9) was clearly recognizable as an English classroom to the research
team and doubtless to others.
Lizzy’s classroom literally ‘stands apart’ from the others in the school.
Physically it is positioned at the end of the playground, reached by leaving the
main school building and walking about 100 metres across the playground,
through a wire-fenced ‘basketball’ area, to a stand-alone building, which houses
both a sports area and this classroom. On the outside walls of the building the
teacher has set up a graffiti wall, which the students have painted on. Lizzy told us
that she had deliberately chosen the location of her classroom: ‘I grabbed that west
wing when nobody else wanted it.’
The majority of texts on display in the classroom are posters from the domain of
popular culture – music, film and television, in particular cable television. Posters
of musicians are taken from across a youth music spectrum, including rap (for
example Tupac, Eminem) and rock (Kurt Cobain) alongside the ubiquitous boyband (Blue). The film posters are of horror films, kung-fu, action films and comedies, several of which have an 18 certificate and could therefore not legally be seen
by the students in the class. There are many posters of characters from the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the spin-off Angel, and classic series such as
Friends and The Simpsons. These posters are representations of the (teacher’s
sense of) the ‘world’ of the students outside of the classroom. They create a highly
visual environment, in full colour, large and ‘loud’, with references that go outside
the traditional range of texts of English. In Lizzy’s classroom these posters are
salient through their number, their size and their placement.
Students’ texts are also on display; the two texts described below are typical. In
the first, the students have imported images of actors, singers, and fashion models
from magazines to represent the different characters from Macbeth (Figure 4.10).
58 English in Urban Classrooms
Figure 4.9
Wayford School: Lizzy’s classroom layout
English classroom as multimodal sign 59
Figure 4.10
Student texts displayed in Lizzy’s classroom
The images are arranged on the page to classify them in relation to one another.
Each image has a written label with the name of the character it represents in a
gothic font. In the second text an image of Eminem is placed next to the written
question, ‘Would the bad boy Eminem make a good boyfriend?’. The student has
then labelled the elements of the question ‘verb’, ‘object’ and ‘subject’.
Texts such as these are displayed all around the classroom. Through these texts
English is displayed as produced by the students at the point where English interacts with (engages with) their life worlds. For example, in the work on classic
60 English in Urban Classrooms
English texts (for example Macbeth, View from a Bridge and Son’s Veto) the
students engage with the characters via images of pop stars, supermodels, and TV
stars from popular culture. In these texts English is not an annotation of popular
culture, in order to foreground the curriculum (as we argued was the case in
Susan’s classroom). In Lizzy’s classroom popular culture survives the engagement
with school English, and is a part of its realization: English is about people, about
relations, and about the social.
There are a few curriculum texts on display: a model examination script, and the
criteria for grades. The teacher’s transformation of the curriculum is realized
through her repositioning of curriculum texts among a web of student and popular
culture texts (as in the case of John’s classroom). However, the web of texts that
Lizzy creates as ‘English’ is very different from John’s. There is no one wall for the
display of students’ texts, nor is one wall given over for the display of teacher texts.
This use of framing realizes a visual ‘equality’ between the texts. The curriculum is
not framed as being of more value or more connected to what English is than, for
example, a poster showing Eminem or the poster for the film The Spy Who Shagged
Me. The teacher does not use framing as a semiotic device to demand or realize
connections between the texts on display. Instead she presents the texts as belonging
to English through their location in the English classroom. The work of making the
connections, selections and relations between texts is left open to the students.
The meshing of different kinds of texts in this classroom is reflected in Lizzy’s
arrangement of furniture in the classroom. The furniture is arranged to create a
fluid space that is not marked into areas of teacher and student activity. The teacher
has bought soft furnishings into her classroom: a carpet, several soft swivel chairs,
a soft armchair, and a sofa – creating a home-like space in her classroom. She regularly reorganized the furniture and desks in the room, and the arrangements were
always non-symmetrical. She used open areas, semi-open classrooms, ‘flexible’
furniture, and multiple spaces for learning.
Lizzy’s classroom as a sign of English
The furniture and spatial arrangement of the classroom can, we want to suggest, be
seen as an example of the organization of the ‘progressive primary school’ finding
its way into secondary-school English and redefining the place to learn and the
future of the school (Stuebing 1995). Lizzy commented on the need for students to
have ownership of the classroom space, the need for opportunities both to ‘feel safe’
and ‘feel challenged’ and the need for students to have some control of the process
of grouping: ‘If it is all just teacher-dominated grouping I am not quite sure what the
educational value is for students who actually have to learn how to manage relationships in later life without someone telling them how to do it.’
Lizzy’s ‘design’ of her classroom can also be seen as a rejection of formal
secondary-school arrangements and an attempt to create a learning environment in
which the curriculum is, as she commented,‘only a small part of what is actually
going on within the whole learning experience’:
English classroom as multimodal sign 61
The curriculum of the whole learning experience is much more to do with
being the child whatever age you are and the potential adult that you are and
the kind of human being that you are and what you have therefore brought to
the classroom … the process of being a learner and how you then bring that to
what you are being offered in an English classroom … you are responding and
being sensitive to what is going on actually over two years … most of my
students I work with over a two-year period, then the results in the end are infinitely better than if you have that immediate what looks like a very positive
response but actually is quite limited and the students may then never achieve
what they are capable of and some students may never achieve really at all.
The home furnishings of Lizzy’s classroom – the sofa, carpet, and pop posters –
and the location of the classroom all serve to distance it from the school as an institution. This serves to construct the classroom (and by implication ‘school
English’) as a ‘pseudoliminal’ space that is neither school nor ‘out of school’,
bordering on the style of a ‘teenager’s room’.
Lizzy’s choice of students’ texts for display serves to reconstruct the relationship between writing and text within the domain of school English. In contrast to
Susan’s use of popular culture as a visual annotation of aspects of the English
curriculum, Lizzy has reframed English as popular culture (and in doing so she has
reframed popular culture as English). In short her visual display serves to position
English and popular culture as interconnected forms of ‘knowledge’. The meanings of popular culture are foregrounded and the position of English in this is
backgrounded. The display shapes the relationship of popular culture (media) and
English as a more traditional set of texts and work on language into a new form that
reflects Lizzy’s current notion of school English and literacies:
I think it [school English] is very much about literacies and that is it is about …
different ways of reading the world and reading the text … I would define that
[literacies] in a very kind of broad way and that is quite a neat one because you
can use that to apply to so many different situations … I suppose the core it is
about using, studying and learning how to use language to make meaning and
ways of using language to make meaning.
Her focus on popular culture and image also relates to Lizzy’s sense and knowledge of her students. She commented on ‘the mess of learning’ and the need to
appeal to the ‘different learning styles’ of students, including those who are more
confident in visual than linguistic representation, especially in the context of what
she describes as a very mixed-ability class:
It is mixed ability in terms of experience of English, if you like, or experience
of being in school and ability, of being able to manage the expectation of being
in the classroom. On that level it is very mixed ability. It is mixed ability in
terms of language, linguistic ability, certainly mixed ability in terms of what
62 English in Urban Classrooms
kind of product they can come out with. It is also very mixed in terms of ability
to negotiate relationships with me, with each other and then also in terms of
preferred learning styles.
The sign – or complex of signs – realized via the visual display of Lizzy’s classroom is one of English as a space in which to collect the life worlds of students – not
to mention that of the teacher, present in the form of kung-fu posters. Here the world
of popular culture is pervasive, and the curriculum is laid over it – gently, offering
the students a filter of ‘school English’ for viewing this everyday world in another
way. The mesh of references on display is not placed in any hierarchical order through
their position in the classroom, nor through the use of colour, size, framing devices, or
lamination. There is no narrative journey mapped through them as we suggest is the
case in John’s classroom. Instead there is a dynamic between the texts and the frame of
‘English classroom’. The question ‘what is English?’ is raised and the role suggested
to students is one of determining how to explore such a question in relation to the
artefacts of their worlds. For Lizzy, English is about communication in a ‘whole
range of literacies’ and the process of learning that underpins this process:
I think part of learning is that learning about your learning and being able to …
evaluate and take risks and to plan for the next step and to consolidate what
you have learnt and to link it with other things you have learnt, all those
aspects – and also to start to grasp conceptually ideas to do with literature, to
do with poetry or whatever aspect of the syllabus it is but it is not just about
learning mechanical skills. It is clearly an intellectual conceptual development
and so it is all those aspects of learning which I have talked about in the
context of the English classroom … That is where you need to build up this
reflective and consciousness aspect of the learning.
Irene’s classroom in Ravenscroft School: English as
the means for ‘having your say in the world’
At Ravenscroft School, as at Springton, the English classrooms adhere to a similar
model and we therefore focus on the description of one classroom, Irene’s, which
is typical of the school’s classrooms. We argue that the coherent character of the
English department in Ravenscroft School stands behind the similarity of the
classrooms. Departmental meetings are regular and most of the English department have worked together as a team for over ten years. In interviews, teachers
advanced very similar conceptions of their work.
In Irene’s classroom (introduced in Chapter 2) as in the other classrooms in
Ravenscroft School, single desks are arranged in three neat rows, with the
teacher’s desk at the front-centre of the classroom (Figure 4.11).
The texts on display in the classroom originate from a number of sources and
they include the students’ work, posters publicizing fiction, poetry, and a reading
campaign.
English classroom as multimodal sign 63
Figure 4.11
Ravenscroft School: Irene’s classroom layout
Unlike the displays discussed in the classrooms of Springton and Wayford, no
official National Curriculum documents are displayed (such as copies of the grade
criteria that appear in each of the other classrooms). The National Curriculum is
not displayed directly in the classroom; nonetheless it is present in the teacher’s
organization of the displays. In these displays, made by Irene, there are two large
titles that are arranged in the centre: ‘wide reading’ and ‘NEAB English and
English literature’ (Figure 4.12); these titles mediate the National Curriculum. The
selection of poems on display (Stevie Smith, John Agard, and so on) relate to the
anthology for English and the National Curriculum. As in Lizzy’s classroom, the
teacher-made texts are few; it is Irene’s arrangement, creation of titles and framing
of the texts on display that is the main evidence of the teacher’s activity in relation
to the classroom displays.
Most of the displays in Irene’s classroom include visual references – in the form
of posters – to contemporary fiction. These include novels by Steven King The Girl
who Loved Tom Gordon and Hearts in Atlantis, Fiona Walker’s Kiss Chase and
French Relations, John Nicol’s Stinger, and Maya Angelou I Know Why the Caged
Bird Sings (Figure 4.13). The books selected for display are books that in Irene’s
64 English in Urban Classrooms
Figure 4.12
The curriculum as displayed in Irene’s classroom
opinion relate to the students’ interests and are also central to her and more broadly
the department’s view of the role of reading and literature. Each of the posters is
surrounded by texts written by the students in response to the themes of the novel.
The salient displays are those of students’ texts framed by the curriculum headings (Figure 4.12). These are the largest displays, and use a strong yellow background with red and black frames. All of the student texts are strongly framed for
display and arranged in a firmly rectangular manner. The careful framing of every
text on display presents each one as a ‘thing in and of itself’ – a product of student
labour. On one of these boards the positioning of the student word-processed texts
in a downward diagonal line creates a strong sense of dynamic movement, which
connects these texts to a published poem. In two displays the student texts are
framed by a heading drawn from the National Curriculum, positioned at the centretop of the board. The headings themselves are framed by the teacher’s use of
borders and the texts on display. The yellow background of the display board
connects the collection of texts as a group – a device for providing coherence. The
strong framing serves to echo in this classroom the English curriculum classification of literature and reading as discrete modules.
Irene’s classroom as a sign of English
The classroom arrangement and furniture in Irene’s classroom is ‘traditional’ – a
tradition that is most typically associated with transmission pedagogy, high teacher
authority and low student participation. However, while Irene maintains her
English classroom as multimodal sign 65
Figure 4.13
Literature displays on the wall of Irene’s classroom
pedagogic authority within the class she encourages the students to participate in
debate very actively and encourages them to challenge her. In doing so, the students
often ‘slouch’, lying across their desks. In a sense – as we discussed in Chapter 3 –
through their body posture they challenge this sign of a pedagogic tradition that the
teacher has established in the classroom. We think that the creation of an environment in which ‘tradition’ can be challenged and ‘authority’ questioned is the pedagogic strategy of this teacher; it is part of her pedagogy of English.
66 English in Urban Classrooms
Irene’s framing of the students’ texts by the headings drawn from the National
Curriculum can be read as a sign of the organizing influence of the official curriculum within the classroom. Yet while the curriculum is present in the work of the
teacher, it is not foregrounded by her, either in her teaching or in the display, as
Irene comments in interview:
What it [the National Curriculum] does is to make it more explicit – you do
these things anyway but it is not … put in this formalised way … in terms of
mapping the curriculum, it is a better approach in my opinion. Initially we felt,
because a lot of people were panicking at the time, that this was something
new and it really wasn’t until later on as we implemented [it] that we realised
that this wasn’t new, it is what we had been doing.
The displays, in particular the posters on display (Figure 4.14), provide a
connection to the popular culture of the students, but it is more restrained, and with
clearer boundaries than those surrounding the use of the images of popular culture
in Lizzy’s classroom. By contrast, here popular culture is clearly framed in the
context of English, in a manner that maintains both the centrality of writing and
reading, and the focus on ‘valued literature’.
A key priority of this English department is to improve the students’ writing
skills – to ‘develop writers’. The orientation of the displays in Irene’s classroom is
towards ‘production’. Through the visual displays the students in this classroom
are positioned as ‘emergent authors’ with the potential to publish. From this
perspective, English is about learning to write for expression, and for future publication. The arrangement of novels and students’ texts in the displays reinforces
both the priority given to writing in the English department, and the curricular
focus on the production of a personal response to a text. Both of these were key
themes in the lessons we observed and were highlighted by Irene as central to what
English is:
They [the students] too must have a kind of viewpoint. It doesn’t matter what,
Shakespeare, it is not the be all and end all, if everybody has a view, so a
personal response. In a sense really you have given them, ultimately you have
given them, it is literature, it is in a sense a window through which they view
that world. You see because they are not able and they are of a young age to
participate in the things they are reading about, it gives them some insight. It is
personal development and intellectual development as well. It is the world
really, they are looking [through] the window because they are young and
therefore we are trying to prepare them, something for that world, something
that they possibly might encounter later in life.
The importance of writing in Ravenscroft School is not linked to the (official)
curriculum alone; Irene links it also to the social situation of the students, who
come from a variety of social backgrounds and experiences.
English classroom as multimodal sign 67
For all the students writing is a key issue. No matter how engaged they are in
the activities you see in the classroom, the writing is that which they are examined through, and so we embrace all those wonderful things, but we feel that
we have to work in their favour and that is what society expects of the
students and we must prepare them – because they are citizens and we are
turning out a whole rather than pieces, we have to look at when they leave
here, what they leave with. So for a child to be seen as able, [it] is the writing
that is taken into consideration so that is going to be and has been for a
number of years our main priority. How do we make these students writers?
It is important because we are talking about a subtly class divided society
where our children in the past… Take a school like this one, they would not
have been able to structure a letter in the way it should because people were,
so to speak, only concerned with their creativity and it was nice to read an
imaginative story – but could a child punctuate? Could a child spell? … All
those are possible political issues but at the end of the day we have to look at it
from a child’s, student’s point of view, parents, and prepare them for that
wider world.
The connection between student texts and published works is prominent in
each aspect of display in Irene’s classroom. The students’ texts are displayed
alongside published material (publicity posters, book covers, and poems), and at
the same time, their work frames each of the published works of fiction or poetry.
In the other classrooms that we have discussed in this chapter there is not that
same meshing of published works and student texts that we see in this school.
English as it is displayed here is essentially about the students’ work in reading,
reflected in their writing, in responding to the written model texts. As Irene
commented:
For any child to learn, to pick up a story and you want them to read this story –
why do I want them to read a story? Why should they read this story anyway?
So you have to therefore make it relevant to these children’s experience. What
is the purpose? Either I want them to model their own writing. If they write a
story you can look at the particular writing that they have read, model their
writing. Have this sense of achievement because there is a story I’ve written,
it, it is imaginative, it is engaging. For them in terms of sense of purpose it is a
sense of achievement, so that is one aspect. The other is, as I said, for them to
be able to use it as a tool. It is a tool in today’s world. They have to be able to
understand how things are put together and see inside. If you take that into it
rather than around something because they are authors themselves. It’s a craft.
So what you are trying to get them to do is create something. Not just eyeing
other people’s creation but to say ‘they have put a short story like this
together; how do you put a short story together?’ I think that is where I am
with English but when I see it is a tool creating something, if you are giving a
viewpoint and you are making an audience, this is your tool.
68 English in Urban Classrooms
As we have said, the classroom displays in Ravenscroft School are oriented
towards ‘production’. Through the visual displays the students are positioned as
emergent authors who have the potential to publish. English is about learning to
write for expression and for future publication. English is the means for having ‘a
say’ in the world.
Conclusion
We have shown how the visual displays and spatial arrangements of the English
classroom can be understood as multimodal signs of English. In particular we
have attempted to show how these signs of English are socially shaped by and intimately connected to a range of factors. These factors include the teacher’s view
of learning and of English, their perception of the students, social forces, histories
and demands that operate on the school and the English department, and their
relationship to governmental policy (for example in the form of the National
Curriculum). The displays and arrangements of the classroom feature in the
production of English in different ways, and we will return to this in other chapters. The displays and arrangements, like any other resource made available,
constitute constraints and possibilities for meaning-making, and, like all
resources, how they are taken up and used varies with teachers, students, and
instances of teaching.
We think that the multimodal way of looking enables us to see some of the
spaces in which ‘school English’ resides that other approaches might not. Our
approach more widely is to show how these resources serve to position students to
curriculum, to school knowledge and to one another in particular ways, to show the
link between policy and practices in English. We want our insights to have practical effects, and so we hope that this way of looking helps teachers to think about
how they construct or might be able to transform their own classroom as a learning
environment. Our examples show that there are many ways to construct the relationship between the formal curriculum and student cultures, that despite the heavy
pressure of regularization of English the potential for alternative positions and
commitments remains.
Chapter 5
The organization of time in the
English classroom
The organization of time
A brief history of (school) time
The organization of time is a central aspect of the work of the school, as it is of
other social institutions. But its centrality does not imply homogeneity: the
processes of schooling do not all follow an identical tempo. On the contrary it is
possible to devise a typology of educational time that is highly variegated, from
the relatively long timescales of child and learner development, to the short-term
objectives of lessons. Moreover, time is contested, at many levels; and different
social interests propose and implement different strategies and practices for its
use. The contests and overlaps that result from such differences feature constantly
in the organization of classrooms. The production of English, like that of any
other school subject, involves a particular combination of imperatives and
resistances, resources and constraints, regulation and agency that cluster around
the use of time. In this chapter we explore the relationship between policy time,
teacher time, and students’ time. In the process, we try to show how the systems of
time-organization established by policy have a substantial effect on the timepractices of English lessons. But we also suggest that the relationship between
teacher time and policy time is not simply one of conflict.
We can begin with the time of policy – a time that is strongly influenced and
shaped by policy-makers’ responses to the rhythms of economic activity. In
The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey discusses – as many others have
done – the acceleration of economic and social life characteristic of the late
twentieth century, where ‘capitalism … has been characterised by continuous efforts
to shorten turnover times, thereby speeding up social processes while reducing the
time horizons of meaningful decision-making’ (1989: 229). Harvey also points out
that this tendency towards acceleration has encountered many obstacles – from the
costs of replacing fixed investments in plant and machinery, to the resistance of
workers and consumers to changes in established patterns of life. In response to
such problems, writes Harvey, ‘there is a whole history of technical and organizational innovation … everything from assembly-line production … to electronic
banking’ (1989: 229). But close to the heart of any programme of acceleration are
attempts – as we suggested in the previous chapter – to enhance the ‘adaptability
70 English in Urban Classrooms
and flexibility’ of workers through the destruction of old skills and the inculcation
of new ones. Such attempts are particularly intense in periods when there is a crisis
of profitability, of the sort that Harvey argues has been in place for much of the
post-1976 period.
Extrapolating from Harvey, we might identify three consequences of accelerated
economic rhythms for education systems. First, these systems are pulled towards the
centre of economic life. In fast-changing times, where profitability is a constant
problem, employers cannot themselves train an ‘employable’ workforce, whose
skills are generic and transferable rather than unique to one sector or workplace; nor
do they wish to bear the costs of prolonged training. Instead, the function of ever
more prolonged and in some respects more complex forms of education and training
is shifted to schools and colleges, and at the same time the performance of education
in raising some kinds of skill level becomes a focus of policy-making and of political
debate. Second, the time horizons of educational change are compressed. Rapid and
continuous change becomes the norm. Policy objectives need to be realized quickly;
‘innovation’ follows hectically upon ‘innovation’. The third consequence is that the
work of teachers is transformed. Harvey writes evocatively of a ‘process of “creative
destruction” which rests on the forced devaluation or destruction of past assets in
order to make way for the new’ (1989: XXX), and his insight could be transferred
from the analysis of balance-sheets to the study of schools.
There are several elements to this process of transformation in the area of
teaching and learning, and in most of them questions of time are important. Here
we deal with four. First, school managements have been enabled – through legislation and training – to win new powers over the use of teachers’ time. The 1987 Pay
and Conditions Act, which defined the extent of teachers’ working hours, and
enforced their attendance at times required by management, was the starting-point
of such change. Second, in the 1990s, a stipulative National Curriculum, and a
comprehensive system of testing and league tables, transformed the work of
teachers, so that the relationship between the ‘events’ of the lesson, the formal
objectives of the curriculum and the certificated outcomes of schooling became
closer. At the same time the effects of the teacher’s work have become measurable.
Third, the same causes have produced an intensification of teachers’ work – not
just a lengthening of the working day, but the creation of an instititutionalized
consciousness of the need to maximize the ‘efficient’ use of time. The seminal
Fifteen Thousand Hours (Rutter et al. 1979), inspiration of the school effectiveness movement, was significant for its alertness in this respect. The modularization
of the school curriculum – influenced by the Hargreaves report (Improving
Secondary Schools, ILEA 1984) and generalized through the National Curriculum
after 1988, was a further incitement to teachers to focus on the productivity of
specific units of time. In the 1990s, Campbell and Neill’s concept of ‘evaporated
time’ (1990) – lesson time lost through routine non-pedagogic activity – was
another indicator of the anxieties that surrounded time-use. The National Literacy
Strategy (1998) in primary schools – and the Literacy Framework, which was just
edging its way into secondary schools at the time our research was finishing –
The organization of time 71
carried the specification of time-use by national policy to a new level of detail.
Fourth and finally, we should note the ways in which the teacher’s time outside
the classroom – the time of preparation, assessment and administration – came, in
the 1990s, to be strongly and directly shaped by policy. Preparing lessons, marking
work, recording progress – all were carried out in relation to national criteria, and
in this sense extra-classroom time was as much subject to guidance and regulation
as time spent with pupils. The effects of this change on ideas and practices of
professionalism, and on the traditional notion of autonomous professional space,
need noting.
These processes have reshaped the ‘time-organization’ of schooling. By ‘timeorganization’, we refer to the ways in which policy at national and institutional
level establishes a template for the use of time by schools. But as we have argued
elsewhere in the book, we cannot assume that policy is in any easy sense directly
and immediately reflected in schools. Schools are, as it were, deeply ‘located’
places. They are sites of fixed investment, for instance, whose architecture
imposes constraints on any sudden reorganization of time and space. More importantly for our argument, they are social places, where particular habits, cultures,
values and traditions have developed to the point where they exercise, for better or
worse, a considerable inertial force and are not susceptible to sudden change. Most
obviously, many of the governmentally generated processes described above have
provoked resistance, which took its most spectacular form in the testing boycott of
1993/94. There has also been a continuous conflict over workload, pursued
through union resolutions and occasional local action.
There is much material here to support Harvey’s claim that the acceleration of
economic processes intensifies ‘struggles … over the use of time and the intensity
of labour’ (1989: 234). But one should also note less visible responses. For
instance, the high rate of resignation among teachers could also be understood as a
form of critical response to pressures of time and restrictions on autonomy. In
addition, as we discuss at several points below, teachers respond to the timedemands of policy in many ways, most of which entail some kind of adaptation,
resistive or otherwise, of templates of time-organization to local circumstance and
history. In discussing the classroom-level production of English we need therefore
to use a term capable of registering these multiple perspectives and conflicts –
hence our employment below of ‘time-practices’ rather than the more unilateral
‘time-organization’ to describe time-related events in the realization of the subject.
David Harvey’s discussion, like ours, owes much to the argument of E.P.
Thompson’s classic study ‘Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism’ (1991
[1965]), with its dense exploration of the relationship between new systems of
time-measurement, and the subjective, ‘lived’ experience of time by factory
workers and managers. Thompson is insistent that the ‘new time’ of the factory
was created through struggle and active discipline, rather than through some form
of consensual arrangement. He writes not only of the formation of new labour
habits but of the ‘imposition’ of a new time-discipline among workers. It would be
tempting to apply the terms of his argument to contemporary schooling, and to
72 English in Urban Classrooms
speak of the new time-organization being imposed on teachers and students.
Certainly, this is what other researchers have argued. Linda Evans and her
colleagues, writing of the early impact of the 1988 reforms on the work of infant
teachers, identify a felt ‘loss of control over time’, and an experience of ‘forced
redirection’ and ‘reduced autonomy’ (Evans et al. 1994: 131). But such a claim,
though insightful, does not fully capture the complexity of current developments.
There is certainly much evidence that teachers respond to the new time-order with
disquiet, even as they accommodate themselves to its rhythms. But we should not
overlook a range of much more positive responses – responses that become
apparent when we consider the ways in which teachers understand and narrativize
recent educational history. We take narrativization to be a ‘second-level’ form of
time-organization. If the first level consists of the material systems of resources
and constraints that organize life-courses and create schedules and rhythms of
work, then narrativization consists of the ways in which social actors make sense
of these systems, and place themselves within them. This ‘second level’ process
feeds back, of course, to the first level: the ways in which people understand their
location in time – in everyday terms, and in terms of career and history – have an
effect on the time-practices they develop.
In narrativizing their work, teachers draw from a potent repertoire of public
discourse. New Labour has created its own way of periodizing historical time. For
much of its existence the Labour Party, like the wider labour movement, has celebrated its distinguished forebears (‘our martyred dead’ and so on), and tended to
trace back a line from the reforming present to its antecedents in previous decades.
In this kind of narrative, continuity is the central feature. But since the mid-1990s,
through work such as that of Michael Barber (1996), a much more sceptical attitude to past achievements has developed, and with it a narrative that emphasizes
breaks and contrasts more than continuities. Ken Jones, discussing the 2001 Green
Paper Schools Building on Success, summarizes Labour’s new understanding of
educational history: ‘[According to Labour] the governments of Attlee and Wilson
– like the Tory regimes sandwiched in between – presided over a largely
“unskilled” working population which had possessed “jobs for life” in local industries … An undynamic economy produced a school system in its own image. In the
supposedly static society of 1944–76 there was no strong demand for certification
and there was a “general acceptance that only a minority would reach the age of 16
with formal skills and qualifications”’ (Jones 2003a).
Comprehensive reform had not done enough to challenge this acceptance and by
setting ‘social’ as opposed to ‘economic’ goals – emphasising egalitarianism at the
expense of standards – it had contributed to stasis. Over-reacting to the failings of
the eleven-plus exam, and dominated by the ‘ideology of unstreamed teaching’
(Blair 1996: 175), it had failed to differentiate among students and to ‘link
different provision to individual attitudes and abilities’ (Jones 2001: 5). One of the
results was mass illiteracy; another, relatively slow rates of economic growth.
New Labour places these ills on the far side of the historical chasm that separates
it from the past. On the near side are those objectives that Blair’s government
The organization of time 73
works towards, and the new kinds of social agency that will achieve them. Thus,
‘standards’ supplants egalitarianism, ‘differentiation’ drives out ‘mixed-ability
teaching’ – and new, purposeful and managerially determined school cultures
replace the fragmented landscapes created by professional autonomy. It is on the
basis of such a narrative of past and present that New Labour can describe its own
project as one of modernization, and describe the cultures of teaching that developed in the decades after 1944 as ‘forces of conservatism’ (Blair 1999).
For many teachers, this omnipresent narrative of progress creates a sense of
having been by-passed by the current development of policy – and devalued too.
Yet it is undeniable that there are others who accept New Labour’s account, and
see the changes of the 1990s as providing new kinds of skill, support and collegiality, in contrast with a past practice understood as uninformed, undirected and
based more on individual preference than on collective approaches. Returning to
Harvey’s motif of ‘creative destruction’, we can therefore speak not just of the
dismantling of previous forms of work-community, but of the sponsored growth of
new ones. Certainly, in the schools we researched, there was strong evidence for
the existence of a commitment to the new, and of an approval of modernization,
with the capacity to cope with its intensity and pressure understood as a source of
self-worth. Teachers thus tended in some sense to endorse New Labour’s
periodization and narrativization, to accept the basic features of its system of timeorganization and to develop different forms of time-practice in their own classrooms – akin to the ‘new labour habits’ and the ‘new time discipline’ of which
Thompson speaks – and we will explore the nuances of this below.
Time and the production of English
In this area of our research we pursue two sets of questions, both intended to
explore further the social shaping of classroom English. The first set consists of
questions such as ‘How is the organization of time materialized in the production
of English?’, ‘How is the relationship between policy time, teacher time and
student time configured?’, ‘What time-practices thus result?’ At the same time as
we explore these questions, we attempt to address others that relate to the explanation of such time-practices in social terms.
As with all our explorations, the conclusions we arrive at are framed in plural
terms: there is no single form of time-organization, and no single category of
agent, that exercises a determining influence on the time-practices of the classroom. Nevertheless, we can speak of more and less powerful shaping factors, even
though the balance between them alters from school to school, and their presence –
as motivator, as ‘bad object’ – varies from department to department.
In several senses, teachers to whom we spoke in Wayford School expressed a
sense of time that was at odds with the time-organization preferred by policy. The
central difference concerned understandings of the relationship between time and
learning. Teaching, for instance, was evoked by one teacher as a process of
learning – developing or shifting over time – in response to personal inquiry and
74 English in Urban Classrooms
engagement rather than to a policy agenda: ‘every year I have a different idea; that
is what is so fascinating about it … I think I do just keep on changing’ (Stephen).
At the same time, teachers were keenly and contrastingly aware of the ways in
which their work related to historical shifts in the management of teaching by
government. At one important level, these were perceived as shifts for the worse:
I should be able to do what I want with them as long as – I think I do have a
responsibility for them with exams and with getting qualifications. That is
obviously part of it. But within that I think I have – a part of that responsibility
is that the Authority and the parents should have faith in me in me that I can do
all that, juggle all that and obviously what the National Curriculum attempts to
do I think is to take away that faith a little bit and say ‘Well, people need to be
accountable, we need to prove this person is doing this and this’, whereas I
would say that a system in which teachers are given all sorts of training and
resources and help in order to have that freedom is a far better thing than
where all that time, energy, money whatever goes into telling us what to do.
(Stephen, Wayford School)
Likewise, another teacher at the school, Lizzy, whose classroom was very
different from any other we entered, talked about the different time-orientation of
her preferred ways of teaching, contrasting them implicitly but unfavourably with
the module-based approach that organizes the work of many departments:
You see it as sort of building up a sort of learning environment?
Definitely, and I think the way I work is not short term. The short-term
results often look quite chaotic and quite negative sometimes, because I think
learning is really messy. I think good learning often looks really messy … and
you have to have to have the confidence and trust that if you keep on giving the
reassurance and support, and also assessing what is going on, and where
necessary putting in more structure if that it what is needed … then the results
in the end are infinitely better than if you have that immediate what looks like
a very positive response but actually is quite limited, and the students may
then never achieve what they are capable of and some students may never
achieve really at all. (Lizzy)
Q:
A:
In this perspective, the organization of the classroom must relate to the longterm developmental needs of the child: learning time is necessarily elongated.
Historically, of course, this is a well-established position, a significant element in
progressive educational philosophy, with its emphasis on ‘devising the right environment for children’ so that they could ‘be themselves and develop at the pace
appropriate to them’ (DES 1967: 187). But it is precisely this position which has
become the central focus of attack from anti-progressives (see Jones 1989), and to
align oneself with it is to take sides in a historical controversy, to present a particular, heterodox narrative of educational change, to refuse to position oneself
The organization of time 75
unequivocally within the ‘modernization’ project and to inhabit in terms of one’s
practice a zone whose reference points are not those of current policy debates.
From such a position, classroom time must be responsive to needs that go
beyond the academic – hence Lizzy’s use of circle time. Students sit in a large
irregular circle, on a mixture of chairs and desks. Some are almost reclining, some
sit on chairs that face backwards. Some students comb each other’s hair while they
sit, such that students arrange themselves at disparate heights. Some choose not to
join the circle. Once the circle is more or less constructed the teacher, Lizzy, says
she has two reasons for the circle time. The first has to do with reflectiveness –
looking backwards in order to go forwards: ‘I want you to be thinking back over
the lessons last half-term in order to gain the best amount that you can; we need to
stop and think from time to time about what we’ve been doing, why we’ve been
doing it and what we can learn from that to help us with the next bit of work that we
do.’ The second reason, the teacher is careful to state, arises from examination
requirements: ‘That’s one of the reasons why we’re doing this and of course another
reason is that as you know all the time I am assessing you and your speaking and
listening and this is another brilliant opportunity for assessing those skills …’
The discussion proceeds. To order the process, the teacher passes round a small
Tigger key-ring: students have to hold the key-ring to be able to speak. If they
don’t want to talk, they can say ‘pass’. The overall effect is one of intimacy, of a
coming together outside the constraints to which exam-related courses often give
rise. As the teacher explains:
The circle time work that I do with them [in English lessons] is specifically
working on the group dynamic, working on relationships and communication
and thinking about what kind of choices they might be making and why they
are making those choices … [This has to do with] my understanding of what
the learning process is about and it being a mixture of cognitive and
emotional, social and individual and that actually if you are not doing that,
addressing that, I am not sure how you are planning for learning.
(Lizzy)
What is suggested here, then, is a way of organizing classroom time (and space)
that is based less on the requirements of modular stages of curriculum organization
than on a long-term creation of what the teacher hopes will be a group of self-motivated – albeit exam-conscious – learners. Transcripts of the lessons show a teaching
style related to the paces of individual learning; different students inhabited, as it
were, different zones of time and space, working at different speeds and in different
parts of the classroom. There was no strong attempt explicitly to organize lessons
around examination requirements. Boundaries between teacher-shaped and studentshaped time were weak: students had a considerable role in determining, through
choice or ‘resistance’, when a task had reached its end. So, although the teacher did
introduce these requirements she was rather dismissive of them and distanced
herself from them, making in some sort a mockery of the forms.
76 English in Urban Classrooms
But this apparent defiance of the timescales of the National Curriculum and of
examination syllabuses was more complex than an explanation in terms of rejection might suggest. Although the teachers may be sceptical about the official
shaping of English, they are at the same time critical of the almost anomic character of their own working situation:
Is there an ethos of the English Department here?
I think that is the problem, there isn’t a coherent ethos. It is very difficult for
me because the thing I spent four years building up I have seen disintegrate …
There is a shared ethos about caring for the kids in a general sort of way but in
terms of an ongoing debate about learning, and learning within English … it
has become very much each person does their own thing.
(Lizzy, Wayford School)
Q:
A:
And:
There is very little sense of your being in a department and that you are
working with colleagues although on a personal level obviously everyone is
friendly … In a way that was very nice because it makes it very easy because
you are just left to get on with it on your own and what help and support [there
was] was all very informal.
(Stephen, Wayford School)
The department does not, from this perspective, offer an alternative set of
resources to those of official policy, and the absence of such collective support
contributes to a sense of isolation and decline:
[There is] precious little debate at all. I think there is a lot of feeling that we are
under pressure and it is a question of keeping your head down and hanging on
and doing what you have to do to survive … I think that is the problem of
working through Ofsted inspections, because we no longer have what we used
to have, the teams of advisory teachers maybe building up relationships with
schools. It means you are neglected for a long time and then get a big slap and
that is not helpful for a school’s development.
(Lizzy, Wayford School)
In this situation, what remains for the individual teacher is to ‘negotiate’ with
National Curriculum requirements in personalized ways:
I am not saying I haven’t got reservations about the National Curriculum and
certainly in the early days I actually resisted and was very critical … but I
think [now] it is a bit more informed … I actually think it is an excuse – people
blame the National Curriculum for not being able to think about the right way
to organise learning because I don’t actually think that does stop it.
(Lizzy)
The organization of time 77
When I hear people talking about the constrictions of the National Curriculum
I think, ‘Well that is rubbish because you are in this room and you can do what
you want.’
(Stephen)
To summarize: we encounter in Wayford School critical orientations towards
current forms of time-organization. Teachers do not regard themselves as being in
step with current policy, and locate themselves in terms of the pedagogies of an
earlier period. But at the same time there is no strong point of reference, in terms of
a culture of teaching, that they feel might inform their work. In this context, the
time-practices evident in lessons are based – as a result both of teachers’ intentions
and pupil attitudes – on weak time-frames, with a preference for continuity and
implicitness of objectives, rather than explicit, exam-related, time-limited units of
work. In all of these senses, Wayford School stands out as different.
Springton School
By contrast, the English department in Springton was working to develop a
homogenous form of time-practice, to which all teachers could adhere. They were
very clear about the ways in which external constraints guided them towards such
a reshaping, but they believed at the same time that such re-development was in
the interests of the students they taught, and that from the point of view of issues
of access and achivement, it was a necessity. To this extent, they were engaged in
a government-driven rhetoric of teaching not so much in spite of their own
commitments, but because of them. ‘The English department is very committed to
inclusive education’, said one teacher (Anna). This meant that nearly all students
were entered for two GCSEs – English and English Literature. But the GCSE
literature course was ‘just vast’ and the teachers found it very difficult to cover it
all; what the students were expected to do was ‘amazing’, and difficult. Teachers
talked in great detail about the ways in which they planned time so as to ensure
that the whole range of tasks was covered – with each piece of coursework, for
instance, taking one half-term. They thought that the students needed prolonged
and close assistance to complete these requirements: ‘to actually get them to do
those pieces of work you have to spend a lot of time with them and then they have
all these huge three exams and everything. It is quite vast’ (Anna).
The teachers’ consciousness of the difficulties that the exam presented for their
students, and their adherence to principles of access and inclusivity defined in relationship to the prevailing requirements of the curriculum and assessment system,
meant that they developed measured and synchronized forms of time-practice in
the department, with teachers sharing a common approach. In this approach we can
distinguish two major elements, which together distinguish the time-practices of
English in the school.
First, and overall, there is the extent of teacher control over the use of time. At
Wayford, time boundaries tended to be ‘fuzzy’. The timings of lessons – their
78 English in Urban Classrooms
beginnings and ends – were conditional upon the levels of consent offered by
students. Within quite broad limits, students could choose on what activities their
lesson time could be spent; teachers’ work involved, to an important extent, an
intervention in students’ activity, which took as its starting-point the tempo of
learning established by the student. In Springton, by contrast, teachers established
the common tasks of the lesson at an early point. Characteristically, they went on to
subdivide tasks into several discrete activities, the time allocated to which had
been pre-measured. The time-boundaries of the activities were clearly stated and
monitored. In much of what we observed, student activity (writing, discussion)
was preceded by a long period of teacher input: as we note in a later chapter,
students tended not to get their hands on texts until beyond the halfway point in the
lesson. In such circumstances, students experienced classroom time as directed
time, whose organization was shaped primarily by the teacher.
In Springton, in Julia’s half-term module, the focus of study was Macbeth. Over
a series of twelve lessons the students focused exclusively, in terms of text, on the
study of Act 1, Scene i – ‘When shall we three meet again?’ – ten lines in total. This
extreme selectivity and textual fragmentation were material realizations of the
teacher’s perception of the difficulty that the students would have in coping in their
examination with a complex text. The perception was further realized in the
teacher’s decision to divide each of the twelve lessons into a series of small tasks.
In one lesson, for example, the teacher repeatedly showed the students a short twominute video representation of the scene, directing the students to focus on particular aspects of the production – the use of music, the visual representation of the
witches, and so on. She gave the students a specific amount of time to respond to
and discuss each successive aspect, and a specific amount of time for them to write
down the points to be made before she repeated the viewing of the scene and
moved on to focus on the next aspect of the scene for discussion. The teacher’s
strictly bounded use and control of time created a patterned rhythm of engagement
with the text, and with one another. Such time-practice was an actualization of the
expectation that she held of students and of their lack of potential for sustained
concentration and work. Macbeth, as a consequence, had to become bite-sized.
(This series of lessons is discussed in detail in Chapter 9.)
We observed similar sorts of textual fragmentation and strict organization of time
across each of the three teachers’ lessons in Springton. When Anna worked with the
students on the realization of character in Romeo and Juliet, she set clear objectives
for each task, broke each task down into a series of instructions, and spent considerable time in each lesson talking through these instructions. As with the lessons on
Macbeth, the students worked on one scene of Romeo and Juliet – Act 1, Scene v, the
Capulets’ ‘old-accustomed feast’ where Romeo and Juliet first meet and fall in love.
They were not given the whole play to read and the scene was further fragmented
during the lessons – the students were given one or two lines to read and to focus on
the realization of their character through voice and gesture; the students’ realization
of character was related directly to the National Curriculum assessment criteria for
speaking and listening. (This series of lessons is discussed in Chapter 7.)
The organization of time 79
Likewise, these same processes – relating to the teacher’s control of the organization and regulation of time, linked to perceptions of their students’ ‘ability’ and
the demands of examination – were apparent in Sally’s lessons. We observed her
teaching Marvell’s poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (from the ‘Hearts and Partners’
section of the NEAB anthology). One long lesson began with 46 minutes of
teacher talk and of collective reading of the poem before the students were given a
copy of a part of the poem to discuss and annotate. The high level of teacher input
indicates the extent to which the teachers in Springton felt students needed assistance and guidance.
So far, we have emphasized the extent of teacher control as a central element of
time-practice in Springton School. The second distinguishing element of such
practice is a prevailing sense that, as Anna suggests above, time is pressured.
Certainly the clattering of Marvell’s ‘time’s winged chariot hurrying near’ was
very audible to the teachers. In relation to the vastness of the tasks involved, they
knew that time was in short supply. It had to be measured, synchronized,
constantly monitored and accounted for; there was no other way of getting the
students through the examination. The examination itself was constantly drawn to
students’ attention – through spoken reminders, through handouts and through
wall displays. In this sense we can speak of a proleptic organization of time: the
tasks of the lesson were described to students as anticipations of examination
requirements; the final goal had a constant presence in the moment-to-moment
activity of the lesson.
To us it appeared that in Springton time was treated as more homogenous than
the time of the other schools. Teachers had adapted to national requirements in a
co-ordinated way, in which many of the ‘traditional’ characteristics of English
teaching had been replaced by practices that centred on the need to achieve
access for working-class and ethnic-minority students to a fixed, explicit curriculum, which was seen offering few possibilities for modification or creative
inflection: the process noted by Harvey of destruction and reconstruction was in
full swing.
Around the project of access, there was thus a convergence of teacher practice.
But this did not mean that students experienced time in an homogenous way. In a
school where general opinion was moving in the opposite direction, this department was committed to inclusive education and un-streamed teaching. Nevertheless, as we suggest in Chapter 6, ‘ability’ remained a prominent factor in
Springton’s English classes, and no more so than in relation to students’ experiences of time. For ‘able’ students parts of the lesson were dense with conversation, in which teachers participated. For the ‘less able’, the situation was
different: there were frequent occasions when they seemed to experience time as
‘empty’ – in which the tasks they were set did not serve to stimulate activity, and
in which the purposeful regime of the classrooms was such that they could not
easily move ‘off task’. In these circumstances, time was spent in silence, or in
halting conversation. These contrasts at the level of ‘ability’ were also a feature
of Ravenscroft School.
80 English in Urban Classrooms
Ravenscroft School
There were few regrets for the past at Ravenscroft. Since the introduction of the
National Curriculum, explained the head of department, there had been ‘more
equality of opportunity’. The changes since 1988 had not weakened teachers’
capacities. On the contrary, they were now ‘more aware of where a child is at,
which again comes back to the heart of everything’. In the head of department’s
account, they were supported in this awareness not by the child-centred philosophies of progressive days – where ‘people were so to speak only concerned with
creativity’ – but by the insistence of the new system on assessment, recordkeeping and breadth of provision:
How do I know that this child hasn’t learned A, B and C? What do I need to
empower this child? … It is good, record-keeping helps – and assessment – to
cater for the needs of the individual student rather than assuming you have
taught something … It has made teaching more effective I think.
Like the teachers at Springton, those in Ravenscroft worked with an understanding that success in public examinations was the key to students’ successful
future. ‘The reality is’, according to the head of department, ‘that the exam, it is
going to influence their future’. The consequence for the school was that ‘exams
have in a sense overtaken a lot of things that we just teach’, or, to put it another
way, classroom activities in Years 10 and 11 occur under the sign of the examination – the sign in which the students will conquer. One of the lessons, taught by
Irene and summarized here in our field-notes, showed very clearly this proleptic
process at work, and the ways in which it connected to the assertion of a very
strong time-discipline:
2.38 p.m. The teacher walks to the front of the classroom. She tells the
students that they should be looking over their first drafts of their coursework:
When I count to three I want you to be ready …
The students are silent, engaged, looking at the teacher or getting out their
pens and diaries on their desks. The teacher walks around the classroom then
walks to the front desk and sits.
2.39 p.m. She starts to count to three:
Okay, one …
She sits on her table, her arms folded, looking around the class.
Let’s stop, listen. Structure your response for A View from the Bridge
[Miller’s play, which provides a coursework text] – you really get the
instructions?
Count the number of words, excluding quotations. ‘First draft’ means you
can go back, amend … You need to work to deadlines. Every half-term we
have a new topic.
She stands, hands on hips.
We do not want any overlapping – I’m not going to be dealing with the View
The organization of time 81
from the Bridge now. We’re using a new half-term unit. First draft in Friday –
get your organizers out and make a note. The one thing I will not tolerate is
‘I’ve done it and it’s at home’. You can write that in your organizers.
Three measures of time-discipline are immediately evident in this brief phase of
the lesson. The first relates to students’ instantly applying themselves to set tasks,
and the second to note-taking that will allow the continuation of lesson work in the
near future, at home. The third measure connects to the longer-term processes – the
completion of separate pieces of coursework, to which specific units of time are
assigned. It is at this level that the examination becomes the central reference
point: the paths of learning lead to the GCSE.
Beyond these measures of time, however, is a fourth element, which makes the
classrooms of Ravenscroft School generally more complex in temporal terms than
those of Springton. The teacher reminds her students that they will be working on a
‘first draft’, a piece to which they will return to amend and revise. In saying this,
she repeats a tactic characteristic of her department: frequently in lessons, teachers
will remind students of what they have studied earlier, of topics and ideas that have
come to serve as reference points for the course, and around which clusters of
meaning can be elaborated. Time-practice in Ravenscroft frequently involves such
recursivity – a recursivity that stems from the department’s ambition for its able
students. It wants them to ‘progressively develop their skills to enable them to gain
access to a deeper meaning’. This process in turn involves the development of a
student’s capacity to ‘play back’ – as one teacher put it – in their formal writing
what they have said, and been encouraged to record in writing, during their
lessons. Recursivity thus forms a counterbalance to the inexorable movement
towards GCSE.
While the prospect of the exam pulls the students on, and provides the motivation and purpose for much of their studies, the students are at the same time incited
to turn back, towards the network of meanings that has been established in the
working history of the group, and towards their own previous individual learning
achievements. In this sense, knowledge enacted at a particular point in local
settings is not self-contained, or confined with the moment, but points instead both
forward and back, creating strong developmental trajectories. To this extent,
Ravenscroft supplies forms of time-organization that are sufficiently strong to
sustain time-practices that are not wholly dominated by examination requirements
– even though, as we have discussed elsewhere, this level of resistance is enabled
in part by a process of academic selection, which has created the student groupings
with whom time-practices of this sort can work.
Conclusion
In this chapter we have aimed to explore the relationship between policy time,
teacher time, and students’ time. In the process, we have tried to show how the
systems of time-organization established by policy have a substantial effect on the
time-practices of English lessons. But we have also suggested that the
82 English in Urban Classrooms
relationship between teacher time and policy time is not simply one of conflict.
Harvey, borrowing from Marshall Berman (1983), uses the term ‘creative
destruction’ to describe the continuing, accelerating process of social change to
which the dynamism of economic life under capitalism gives rise. The term is
intended to suggest remaking, as well as demolition, and it is certainly a process
of remaking that we have encountered at several points in our research. Quite
definitely, many teachers have constituted themselves as collectives devoted to
ensuring that their students have the best possible chance of success under the new
system of curricular regulation, and in the process they have embraced the ‘new’,
if one may still use that term of a system that has been taking shape since 1988,
with an enthusiasm that is far more than tactical. Teachers have – in their accounts
– worked with as well as against the National Curriculum. They have developed
forms of time-organization – collective, synchronized approaches to lesson and
unit planning – that sustain a practice they feel confident in justifying. To this
extent, they feel that the time-practice of lessons is under their control, and is
working in the interests of students.
Yet there remain doubting voices. Few teachers are entirely happy with the
priorities and time pressures of the National Curriculum and examination system.
Some are strongly critical, in the name of ideas of learner development that work
with very different timelines. And beyond such explicit articulations, there are
other tensions. The conflict between different sorts of time-organization is
embedded in practice, not simply voiced by means of interview. Perhaps the
greatest tensions occur where the demands of institutional time-organization
encounter the mass of the student population. It is at these points that time hangs
heaviest – and emptiest – and that students, by their attempts to worry at the timeboundaries of lessons and by their reluctance to fill with recognizably meaningful
activity the empty time allocated to them by teacher-set tasks, become prominent
actors in the classroom realization of educational time.
Chapter 6
The pedagogic construction of
‘ability’ in school English
The pedagogic construction of ‘ability’
Introduction
The teacher’s work involves the continuous ‘structured improvisation’ of English
both as a matter of curriculum content (an ideational construct), and as a matter of
the social relations in the classroom (a pedagogic, interpersonal one). That is, the
teacher always and simultaneously creates both a content for English, and a way
of positioning students differentially in relation to that content. Here we focus on
this differential positioning of students, and on the role played in this by the near
commonsense notion of (differential) ‘ability’. We argue that ‘student ability’ is
at least partly constructed in social interaction, and may not be stable beyond the
context in which it is ‘produced’. Out of this understanding comes a means for
seeing how the teacher’s perception of students in relation to ‘ability’ gives shape
to very different constructions of what English is or comes to be for different
groups of students.
One of the most striking features of the three schools and nine classrooms that
we researched was the ways in which what happened within them – groupings,
tasks, communication (whether in action, gesture, position, speech) – was
dependent on the classification of the students by ‘ability’. In our study one of the
schools we worked in, Ravenscroft, ‘streamed’ students according to their attainment on entry at 11 years. However, even in the ‘mixed-ability’ classrooms of
Springton School and Wayford School, teachers described their classes in terms of
a ‘top-ability group’, one or two ‘middle groups’ and a ‘low-ability group’. In this
chapter we argue that, whether in the streamed school or in the ‘mixed-ability’
classes, ‘low-ability groups’ participated in and experienced a very different
version of English to that produced for their ‘more able’ peers.
Teachers described different levels of expectation for the different groups. For
example: ‘I think only two or three will get a Grade C at GCSE … So consequently I do very, very basic things with them … what I do with them is very
much, putting it crudely, simplifying stuff in order for them to just finish and
complete it really’ (Stephen, Wayford School). In contrast, a teacher working
with a ‘top’ group explained: ‘I want them to be reaching the highest grades … I
always try and pitch really high with them and deliberately make loads of
84 English in Urban Classrooms
assumptions so that if they don’t understand or if they don’t know, they can ask.
But if they start up there, they can see where I am wanting to come in at’ (Diane,
Ravenscroft School).
Although we see ‘ability’ as produced by teachers and students in the context of
their interaction, that context is, of course, made up of the products of other forms
of agency. These include a discourse which produces dominant ‘commonsense’
understandings of differential levels of intelligence: school and departmental ‘traditions’; student cultures; the institutions established by national, government
policy; and the discourses associated with each of them.
The concept of differential ‘ability’ is very much a product of the establishment
of mass schooling, and of restricted access to its higher levels. In many respects,
the role of state schooling in urban areas has taken an enduring form. Schools have
always worked to socialize and control students around particular sets of values
and forms of knowledge, and at the same time schools have always distributed
knowledge differentially, often in relation to social group membership. For
example, in the 1944 Education Act, ‘intelligence’ testing provided what was seen
as a technically neutral tool for allocating and targeting limited resources to a
selected group of students. Tests were claimed to assess students’ suitability for
different programmes in different types of school.
‘Ability’ was challenged in several ways from the 1960s onwards – through the
abolition of the eleven-plus examination especially, the rise of unstreamed
(‘mixed-ability’) grouping, and the development of forms of evaluation that
sought to be responsive to student interest and experience rather than heavily
emphasizing fixed, ‘objective’ criteria. Nevertheless, the assumption of fixed and
differential innate levels of ability has lingered on. This can be seen in the dominant rhetoric in schools of ‘meeting each child’s needs according to his or her ability’, but also in formal and informal teacher assessments that lead to grouping
arrangements based on teacher perceptions of ‘ability’ within ‘mixed-ability’
classrooms from the earliest years. Once allocated to a group, students have tended
to be given differential tasks with expectations of different levels of outcome.
Students tend not to be shifted from group to group, so once they are allocated to a
‘bottom’ or ‘top’ group, receiving different tasks and different levels of feedback,
the gap between top and bottom group widens and widens, creating a self-fulfilling
prophecy (Bourne 1994).
What appears to be overlooked in such organizational strategies are the cultural
resources that students bring into the classroom with them, and their match with
the demands of the school curriculum. This was not always so, and especially not
in relation to the teaching of English. The publication from the 1950s onwards of
English texts and the dissemination of methods of teaching English that aimed to
bring ‘working-class experience’ into the classroom were manifestations of a
recognition of the importance of cultural capital by those who worked in education. This was extended in the 1970s and 1980s by the emergence of the classroom
politics of race and gender. Secondary-school English was one of the sites where
such work was most strongly advanced.
The pedagogic construction of ‘ability’ 85
However, since 1988, in a social context marked by rising levels of poverty,
growing inequality and (for some) great precariousness in matters of employment
security and quality of life, educational policy has taken a new turn, which has, in
some respects, transformed power relations and systems of meaning and value in
the school. For our purposes we need to emphasize four such transformations.
First, there are changes in the position of teachers. Compared with the period 1944–
88, teachers experience greatly reduced autonomy around questions of curriculum
content (Furlong et al. 2000). Their performance is more closely audited and managed.
Second, there is the development of nationally planned curricula, and of regular forms
of testing. These affect all students and all teachers. Third, under these two pressures,
forms of pedagogy have changed. Grace noted the presence in urban schools from the
1960s onwards of a ‘principle of rapport’, which ‘celebrated the importance of friendliness and good interpersonal relations, of understanding … “youth culture” and of
sympathising with social and economic disadvantages’ (1995: 216). Grace noted also
that increasingly, in the same period, liberal rapport was challenged by a different principle, which he names ‘radical dialogue’, that had ‘dignified the student and the status
of his or her language, theorising and culture’ and that had hoped to see the school
become the ‘arena for the representation of a rich variety of cultural patterns, forms of
communication and levels of consciousness’ (1995: 219).
Under the impact of the National Curriculum and increasingly frequent testing,
the decline of teacher autonomy, and the attenuation of links between aspects of
the work of the school and the activity of social and cultural movements, neither of
these principles acts any longer as a reference-point for classroom practice. What
has replaced them is a curriculum based on the idea of ‘entitlement’ and ‘access’.
In England now, under the new educational order, these terms signify the predominance in the curriculum of a single type of authorized knowledge. The role of the
school is to ensure that students can successfully access this authorized form. In
practice, however, achieving access is difficult, especially among ‘disadvantaged’
groups. Since curriculum experiment and ‘dialogue’ around the validity of
different forms of knowledge are no longer options, teachers’ work is channelled
along other routes. They need to devise pedagogic strategies that can maximize
success in terms that are pre-given.
Finally, and importantly, there is the renewed prominence of ‘ability’ as an
operational, institutionalized aspect of schooling. Since 1988 – and especially
since the election of the New Labour government in 1997 – ‘ability’ has reemerged as a central, government-endorsed principle of educational organization
(Edwards and Tomlinson 2002). Tests and examinations are ‘tiered’, so that entry
to higher levels is restricted on ability grounds; streaming and setting of classes is
encouraged; entry to particular types of (nominally comprehensive) school is
connected to student success in national assessments or in entry examinations. In
addition, because a school’s public recognition and funding levels are strongly
affected by its examination results, there is strong pressure for schools to identify
‘able’ students and to maximize their attainment, often at the expense of others
(Gillborn and Youdell 2000).
86 English in Urban Classrooms
The role of ‘ability’ as an organizing concept in a
‘streamed’ school
In Ravenscroft School students were streamed on entry into three classes,
according to their primary school assessment ‘bands’. By the time students
reached Year 10, the year that we studied, those in the ‘top’ class, those who had
been seen at age 11 as high achievers, were not thought to have problems with
confidence. Their English teacher said:
I think they are quite aware of each other and their voices are very different
and their way of expressing themselves is very different and their confidence
levels are very different and their expectations are very different and that
comes out now where you talk to the students in Year 10 about whether or
not they are going to go to university or what they want to study … They are
very aware of each other’s strengths and weaknesses … I think they could
rate each other for everything, who is better at reading, who is better at
reading poetry, so they are very aware of how they run up and down the
pecking order.
(Ravenscroft, Diane)
However, the gains in student confidence were not passed on to those students
allocated to the ‘bottom’ stream. As their English teacher volunteered in interview:
‘I think you can’t escape from the notion of sheep and goats … As soon as you start
setting, you end up with this bottom-set syndrome’ (Ravenscroft, Paul).
In observing the ‘bottom’ stream English class, we were aware that it included a
small number of students still at an early stage of learning English, together with
some students with ‘special needs’ requiring extra ‘support’ assistance. In fact,
two other adults apart from the English teacher himself were present in the room
during the lessons, sitting next to their own ‘allocated’ students and helping them
complete individual work.
How is ‘ability’ realized in this ‘bottom set’? In one lesson observed, the
teacher’s objective was to teach students to make comparisons between broadsheet
and tabloid newspapers by comparing the use of ‘emotive words’. He began the
lesson by reading out two headlines from a list in his hand, asking students to identify which contained the ‘most interesting’ or ‘emotive’ words. He told the class to
‘put your right hand up if it is the first word; put your left hand up if it is the second’
(in demonstrating this, the teacher indicated that one example of such contrasting
headlines was: ‘Fire at School’ or ‘School Blaze’). The students mainly sat silent
and unmoving. Few hands were raised.
In the second lesson there was the same absence of interaction and low level of
activity. The students were asked to draw a grid indicating differences between the
tabloids and broadsheet examples they had been given. For many pupils drawing
this grid took up most of the lesson. Towards the end of the lesson the teacher
remarked: ‘You’ve spent far too long drawing the chart, and not enough on
The pedagogic construction of ‘ability’ 87
content. You’ve got five minutes left now, and you need to make sure that by the
end of this time you’ve written at least two rows.’
Resistance takes many forms, refusal to engage being one of them. In interview
with the project researcher, the students from this class were lively and engaging.
Yet in class, over the whole unit observed, the students showed – by their posture
and gaze – that they were disengaged from the teaching that took place. They leant
back, avoided eye contact with the teacher, spoke without expression, sometimes
stifling yawns, with the girls casting glances and smiles at one another if nominated to speak, as if in a conspiracy of non-participation.
In his struggle to make contact, to elicit a reaction, and to get through the (his)
set curriculum, the teacher broke the teaching into smaller and smaller ‘learning
chunks’, as we have shown above, filling the time slot with busy work – drawing
the grid, filling in worksheets. In interview he said he felt forced to narrow the
curriculum:
I know well the ideal would be that of course you open things up, and the more
you open things up the better they can do. But that of course depends on the
students you are dealing with and the context that you are teaching within, and
we haven’t got the students [in this class] with sufficient cultural capital for us
to be able to say ‘well you have got all the basics so we can open up the text’.
We can’t do that really.
Bernstein (1990) has argued that education for ‘low-ability’ groups appears to
focus on ‘facticity’, not on critical reflection or on cultural connectedness. He
suggests that the classrooms of those not ‘selected’ as ‘able’ are the site of an
austere cultural regime where the meanings, ideas and values of learners find few
points of connection. However, we argue later in this chapter that this approach to
those perceived of as ‘low’ in ‘ability’ can also take place in ‘mixed-ability’ classrooms, though in a subtler form, with different input – both in mode of communication and in content – and feedback still constructing ‘sheep’ and ‘goats’.
Constructing ability in a ‘mixed-ability’ class
Here we demonstrate the process of constructing ability in a ‘mixed-ability’ class
by focusing analytically on two episodes in one English lesson with the one class
in which a teacher, Susan, works consecutively with two groups of students, in
Springton School. Focusing in detail on two (typical) episodes of small-group
work – of about six minutes each – we show how the teacher’s conception of
English varies in relation to the two groups, and how different groups therefore
receive very different versions of English, even in the same classroom.
Susan’s decision to organize her class into small groups for much of the time in
her lessons configures the interpersonal relationships between teacher and students
in the English classroom in a particular way. It suggests that English, in the context
of Springton, is not intended to be a subject produced (solely) by the teacher and
88 English in Urban Classrooms
transmitted to students in a didactic form. Rather, English is intended to be produced
through the interaction of peers, through their engagement with previous knowledge
and ‘out of school’ cultural understandings over a text, with the teacher having more
the role of facilitator. As we showed in Chapter 3, this arrangement of the classroom
is a sign of this (interpersonal) process of producing English, with the students
grouped around the tables facing each other rather than the teacher. However, as we
showed in that earlier chapter, spatial arrangement alone does not determine the
specifics of the kind of English actually produced. In our study we encountered, in
different classrooms, the use of both small-group work and whole-class work, and
found that of themselves neither of these allowed us to predict the particular kinds of
English that were produced there. For example, in Irene’s classroom we found a
quite formal arrangement of the furniture, but this did not produce what it might have
been expected to produce in terms of social relations.
Before offering a detailed description of these two episodes we first give an
overview of the lesson in which they occurred, and show how in each case the
National Curriculum frames the lesson. Springton, like the other schools in our
study, is an inner-city school with a diverse ethnic population, a high proportion of
students from working-class families, and a high percentage of students with
English as an additional language – a significant number of whom are refugees.
Standards in English overall are well below the national average in all forms of
assessment at Key Stages 3 and 4. Susan is an experienced teacher and has taught
these particular students over nearly three years.
Government policy at the time of our study promoted differentiation through
setting into different classrooms by ‘ability’. Springton’s decision not to ‘set’
students for English was mentioned as a cause for concern in the school’s most
recent Ofsted report, which stated ‘The very wide range of attainment within
mixed-ability teaching groups makes it very difficult for teachers to ensure that all
students are making appropriate progress’. Student ability, and the pedagogic
strategies thought to be necessitated by ability differences, were raised by Susan in
interviews. For example:
I mean, that class does have quite a range of students and there is quite an able
group at the top I think, which in some of the classes you don’t have as much, I
don’t think. So I think I probably, I am not sure how, that definitely does influence how I teach, I think, and I know there are students that will explain
things, so although I do try to get them to feedback into the classes, I tend to do
a lot of group work. I think that helps students learn and I would do that with
any group. Even with a group that found it difficult I would persevere because
that’s … where they learn.
And later:
I think they need quite a lot of support and you couldn’t just say ‘do this’ with
any task. Every task has to be broken down – you do lots of tasks to build up
The pedagogic construction of ‘ability’ 89
what you want to do. Maybe in a different type of school I think you would
approach – you might get to the text more quickly or something like that. I
think you have to engage their interest before you even get to the text.
The lesson that we focus on here is the seventh in a series of twelve lessons, over
a month, on the poems featured in the NEAB anthology section ‘Hearts and Partners’. The subject of the lesson is Andrew Marvell’s ‘Letter to His Coy Mistress’,
the only compulsory poem in the examination syllabus, for this unit. That fact
gives it a central place in the curriculum, and in our analysis of English here.
The lesson objectives reflect the National Curriculum requirements for reading
– the need for students to be able to ‘read for meaning’ and to ‘understand the
author’s craft’. Specifically, successful students are required to extract meaning
beyond the literal; to explain how the author’s choice of language affects meaning;
to analyse and discuss alternative interpretations and how emotions and ideas are
portrayed. These competencies will be assessed, of course, and Susan feels the
added pressures of teaching assessment strategies as well as literature, as she said
when interviewed: ‘I suppose at Key Stage 4, unfortunately, it is quite exam orientated. I mean that is what those lessons are about really and I want them to know
and understand the poems that they are studying and to be able to kind of also know
what they need to do in an exam.’
The students are seated at tables in groups of three or four; dictionaries are
handed to each table. Following a whole-class teaching episode in which Susan
models the process of ‘textual analysis’ for the whole class – the kind of textual
analysis required by the examination syllabus – Susan hands over the poem in the
form of a one-page hard copy to the students. Each group is given one stanza of the
poem to ‘analyse’, an activity that appears to include, in varying degrees, basic
explication, interpretation and response. It is what happens in this part of the lesson
that is the focus of our analysis.
When first watching the video of the lesson we were immediately struck by the
difference in the teacher–student interaction between two groups she worked with
consecutively during this group-work section of the lesson. Group 1 consists of
two girls and one boy, all of minority-ethnic-group background. Group 2 consists
of four boys, of mixed ethnic origin; in that second group the teacher interacts with
just one boy directly, Tony. Our analysis is a multimodal one, in order to ‘get at’
the difference in the two interactions, to explore what it is that is being produced as
English for different pupils, and how this is done. Gender and ethnicity are not our
focus here, even though it would be possible from the data to make comments. In
this specific context, it is not the social categories of ethnicity or gender that are
salient in constructing the different forms of English, but that of ‘ability’.
Our analysis demonstrates that both students and teacher are active in the
construction of forms of subjectivity through their interaction. That is to say, given
the social constraints and possibilities that are at work in this classroom, it is both
the teacher and the students who act, even if very differently, and with different
means and resources. We want to insist that students themselves are involved as
90 English in Urban Classrooms
active agents in their own positioning in relation to English, and therefore also to
the category of ‘ability’, although their choices of ways of acting may not be to
their own long-term advantage. The episodes are co-productions involving all
participants.
A comparative multimodal description of
two instances
As we have argued throughout this book so far, semiotic resources (modes) such
as movement, body posture, gaze and gesture are as much part of the making of
English as are the linguistic resources of speech and writing, which have customarily attracted the attention of researchers. Here we examine the orchestration of
semiotic resources in the work of the teacher – including movement, body posture,
gesture (including gesture with objects), gaze, speech and writing – in the context of
the spatial arrangements of the classroom. We begin by looking at modes other than
speech or writing by which English is constructed. We then analyse ways in which
‘official’ written texts – parts of the poem, the dictionary – are deployed. Subsequently, we attend to the written texts and to utterances produced by the teacher and
by students. Of course, in the classroom all these resources are simultaneously in
use. We focus on them separately for analytic purposes. In our conclusions, we refer
back to some of the wider contextual factors already raised in Chapter 2, and occasionally elsewhere in the book. We want, after all, to keep to the forefront of our
attention that it is the multiplicity of social factors that shape the manner of their
combination in the realization of English.
The multimodal construction of ‘ability’ in Group 1
In this classroom, both the teacher and, to a much lesser extent, the students can
move in the space of the classroom. They position themselves in relation to one
another, and in relation to the furniture and objects in the classroom. As we have
argued, these positionings and the resultant interactions contribute to different
realizations of English for different pupils, with implications for how students see
and feel themselves as learners of English.
In this first episode the teacher walks up to a group around one of the tables. By
placing herself at one side of the table (a space not occupied by a student), the
teacher effectively locates herself within the group, as if she were one of the participants, for the time of her presence (see Figure 6.1).
Her position provides a specific potential for engagement with this group. She
leans across the table, opposite to one girl, whom we will call Sofia, making her,
through positioning and gaze, the main focus of the interaction. A little later the
teacher moves from her initial position directly opposite to Sofia to somewhat
more to the side of the table, producing a shift in her relation to the group – maybe
that from member more to observer, and, thereby invites a shift in the manner of
engagement of the three students from listeners to performers.
The pedagogic construction of ‘ability’ 91
Iqbal
Sofia
Teacher
Najma
Figure 6.1 Springton School, Group 1: position of teacher and students
Her movement allows the three students to see the whiteboard previously
obscured by her body. This also marks a shift, from the authority of the teacher
herself to a focus on the authority of (what has been written on) the whiteboard. In
this way the teacher’s movement as a semiotic resource becomes a sign of some of
her expectations vis-à-vis the students, namely expectations about forms of interaction, and serves to frame the teacher–student interaction.
Susan’s initial positioning of Sofia as her major interactant, through the position she
assumed at the table, is also realized and reinforced through her gaze. Throughout,
Sofia and the teacher engage in direct eye contact. By contrast, Iqbal (to the left of the
teacher) and Najma (to her right) hardly make eye contact with her at all, nor she with
them; rather they make eye contact with Sofia. Their gaze confirms Sofia’s central role
as representative for the group. Sofia herself uses gaze to indicate requests for teacher
response, reassurance and help, without verbalizing her needs. Throughout the episode
teacher and students use gaze to draw the text into their interaction.
Although there is a chair at her end of the table, the teacher chooses to stand
throughout the interaction, or to lean rather, across the table – into the group, in
changing postures. Initially, her upper body and arms are stretched almost horizontally across the table. This posture brings her head much closer to the students than
if she had remained upright, or had been seated; her outstretched arms link her to
the group. Her posture, her smile and her laughter signify casualness, informality,
friendliness, being relaxed. By remaining standing she suggests the temporary
nature of her visit and the interaction – as if she had merely ‘dropped in’, casually,
for a pleasurable conversation. The body-posture of the students is also relatively
open and expansive. Sofia leans back and stretches her hands behind her head, as
does Iqbal later. The students sit relatively low in their chairs, and throughout most
of the interaction Iqbal rests his gently folded arms on the table. These embodied
signs both shape the interaction and provide a frame for all aspects of them. At this
table, they are the material-bodily expression of a construction of English as the
pleasure of engaging in discussion over a text.
92 English in Urban Classrooms
Tony
Teacher
Hassan
Peter
Figure 6.2
Chris
Springton School, Group 2: position of teacher and students
The multimodal construction of ‘ability’ in Group 2
Leaving Group 1, the teacher walks over to the second group of students, and
without hesitation sits down at a corner of the table, next to one student, Tony, on
her right (see Figure 6.2).
During the episode she does not alter her basic position, signalling ‘permanency’ by seating herself there (rather than ‘dropping in’ as she did with the other
group). This impression is very clear, despite the fact that both interactions last for
the same amount of time. In a seeming paradox, at Table 1 (where she has merely
‘dropped in’, so to speak) her position signalled membership of the group; here,
where she is seated, she is an outsider. Placing herself where and as she does also
seems to suggest that she is preparing to work just with Tony, rather than engaging
with the whole group.
Once seated, the teacher immediately leans forward to pick up a pencil. She then
draws Tony’s copy of the poem towards herself, putting her left elbow on the table
and supporting her head on her hand as she starts to read the first line of the poem.
Her upright, angular and tense body-posture contrasts with the almost horizontal
posture adopted by her in the interaction with the first group. In the earlier episode
she leaned in toward the students; here she leans in toward the poem. The position
of her arms and head over the text close her off from interaction with the other
students at the table; it is a posture that does not invite interaction. Whereas in the
previous episode the teacher’s posture actualizes a sign of shared pleasure, here her
posture, together with her appropriation of pencil and text, actualize a sign of
authority and of directed instruction (or work).
As the teacher asks the students specific questions, her body posture changes.
She leans back from the text, shifting her hand to rest on her left hip, an attitude we
had already observed as her stock posture in managing whole-class teaching interactions, of gaining and controlling attention. Her posture is now entirely upright,
still angular and tense. Throughout the episode the teacher moves between these
two postures of leaning in toward the text, and sitting upright in her chair. Through
The pedagogic construction of ‘ability’ 93
her first posture she models ‘doing English’ as work, an individual engagement
with the text. Through her second posture she shifts back to a ‘teacherly’ role,
checking students’ understanding.
As with her movement, positioning and posture, the teacher’s use of gaze differs
between the first group and the second. With Group 2, the teacher spends most of
the episode looking at the poem/text, focusing attention on the text, her head down,
reading, and annotating the text. When she looks up at the students to ask a question, her look is brief, wavering, and it quickly drops back to the text. The text, not
the students, is the teacher’s dominant object of gaze, and attention to the written
text is the purpose of the sign of this interaction. At the same time the students gaze
downward at the table in front of them, rarely looking at the teacher, even when the
teacher is talking. Unlike Sofia, Iqbal and to a lesser extent Najma, these students
do not use gaze as a resource for engaging with the teacher.
Throughout this episode, Tony sits with his arms either under the table, or folded
across his chest. His posture is closed. The body posture of the other students at the
table is upright and stiff, which can be read as signalling a form of resistance. They
shift their posture only when the teacher asks them to look up a word in the dictionary. They do this, leaning forward, flicking through the pages. As the teacher then
reads the excerpt, Tony leans backs and yawns, a sign of disengagement. The stiffness of the posture of the students and of the teacher is in marked contrast to the
openness, ‘looseness’ and fluidity of the participants’ posture in the first
interaction.
The teacher’s eye contact with the text signifies her focus in her work with
Group 2. The teacher is not intent on the work of producing interaction and debate,
and the students are not engaged in the work of producing meaning. The lack of
exchange between the teacher and students indicates a lack of co-production of
interpretation and meaning in this episode.
‘Ability’ groupings and interaction
When we viewed the video-recording of this interaction, the difference between
the two was striking, both in the modes of interaction, but also in the kind of
English teaching that characterized each. At this point we turned to interviews
with the teacher, and noted that Group 1 is perceived by her to be a ‘high-ability’
group. She sees its members as capable of responding successfully to the demands
of the curriculum and the examination syllabus. For them English is configured, at
least in part, as conversation, in which dialogue, informality, the students’
perspectives and expertise are all valued – though valued only in part. As we have
seen, the teacher’s position and posture was aimed at soliciting from them an
articulation of their response to the text. But at the same time, aspects of the teachers’ talk, those aspects of her gaze and gesture that involved – even at their table –
the dictionary, the whiteboard and its instructions, tend in another direction. At
this point there were clearly discernible tensions between the students’ interests in
exploring the meanings of the poem, and the teacher’s urges, which were more
94 English in Urban Classrooms
directed towards the kinds of reading and response that are valued in terms of the
National Curriculum. To some extent the latter constrains the responses that she
might otherwise have allowed herself to evoke or to follow up – those of a historical, social or culturally inflected kind, but which in the context of the demands of
the official curriculum she perhaps felt could not, seemingly, be foregrounded.
As we have shown, the situation is very different for Group 2, whom this teacher
does not recognize as able. Our analysis of the video-recording reveals that in
Group 1 the teacher’s gaze, movement and posture produce a sense of English as
that curriculum subject in which the text is the point of departure for engaged
discussion, for personal involvement, for pleasure. In contrast, the same teacher’s
use of the same modal resources with Group 2 produces a kind of English that is
about closure, about instruction in which the authority of the text, the teacher and
the dictionary as producers of its meanings are paramount.
We will now extend our analysis of these differences, looking at the modes of
gesture, talk and writing.
Gesture
In Group 1 the teacher and students both use gesture during their interaction, realizing their own constructions of the meaning and purpose of English. In this group
students gestured at the poem, the dictionary, and at their body, indicating the
focus of interest or term of reference of the gesture. The move from gesturing
towards the poem to gesturing towards the body marked a shift in reference from
the poem-as-text to their personal response to the poem. Sofia’s gestures toward her
body – trying to find acceptable words for ‘sexually aroused’, for instance – relate
the emotions and motivations of the female character in the poem to her personal
response and emotions. Her gestures that were directed towards the text focus on
the meanings of the words of the text. Through gesture she embodies the text.
Open gestures are expansive. Sofia opens and waves her arms and hands to
express ‘sexual excitement’ (a gesture that Iqbal fills in verbally with the word
‘horny’), and later she makes a sweeping gesture over her shoulder to express ‘the
past’. Similarly, when the teacher opens her hand and moves it in a circular motion
as she asks ‘what is he trying to say there?’, she is making an open gesture, which
in this instance seemed to be a sign ‘making an opening’ for the students, asking
for their explanation or response – their offering to the interaction.
While both the teacher and Sofia directed gestures at their body and the text,
Iqbal’s gestural repertoire was different. At one point, while the teacher and Sofia
discussed the text, Iqbal, himself not speaking, accompanied their conversation
with a set of sinuous hand movements. These seemed self-referential rather than
directed towards the poem or the conversation – and to represent a quotation from
‘non-schooled’ forms of behaviour, associated, we thought, with dance and ‘bodypopping’. We interpret Iqbal’s gestures at this point as indicating a contesting of
the value of the conversation between teacher and Sofia, and the counterposing of
a (male, unschooled) gestural repertoire to a (female, schooled) one. This
The pedagogic construction of ‘ability’ 95
interpretation fits with his verbal dismissal of the poem as ‘rude’ and as outside of
the realm of the literary. By contrast, the gestures of Najma were directed solely at
the text, suggesting a focus on meaning located ‘within’ the text, rather than as a
personal response to the poem.
The teacher’s gestures were primarily directed at the dictionary, which
throughout the interaction was deployed as a text second in importance only to the
poem itself. While the modes of gaze and posture invite the students’ personal
responses, her gesture, by contrast, indicates and reminds the students of her pedagogic intentions, of the job in hand. The teacher’s holding of a page, finger
pointing to a specific place while a student talked, was a sign of her listening whilst
maintaining her pedagogic agenda. By contrast, continuing to flick the pages of the
dictionary as a student talked served as a sign of the teacher’s desire to change the
analytical focus from the personal or sociocultural back to the textual.
Pointing at the text served to bring elements of the text to the fore, whilst linking
text and person. At one point in their co-produced analysis, the teacher is pointing
at the word ‘transpire’ in the dictionary while Sofia is pointing to the same word in
the poem; the teacher then leans and points to that word in the poem.
In contrast to the shared use of gesture in Group 1, with Group 2 it is primarily the
teacher who gestures. As the episode begins, Tony points to a place on the poem/
sheet in response to the teacher’s request to know where they are ‘up to’. When the
teacher puts her own finger at this place, Tony removes his finger. The whole
episode ends with Tony placing a finger on the text as if he were ‘taking it back’. In
between Tony’s initial and final pointing with his finger, no student holds or touches
the poem. Gesturally, the text of the poem remains with the teacher throughout the
rest of the episode. With the exception of Tony’s opening and closing gestures,
the students do not use gestures in this episode. They gesture neither towards the
poem nor towards the dictionary. Nor do they indicate their personal response to
the poem by gesturing toward themselves, as the students in Group 1 had done.
With the second group, the teacher’s use of gesture is similar to that in the previous
group, although used with lesser frequency. She makes several ‘opening up’ gestures,
offering the text for analysis as she asks ‘what does it mean?’ and a number of more
closed gestures, indicating lexical items. However, whereas in the previous episode
the teacher had held the dictionary, here she holds a pencil. This use of the objects
dictionary and pencil positions her differently in relation to the analysis of the poem.
The use of the dictionary in the previous episode had made her into one of the group,
jointly deferring to the authority of the dictionary. The use of the pencil in Group 2
separates her from the group, as someone who acts distinctively, controlling the pencil
and thus channelling the focus of attention word by word on the reading of the text,
rather than inviting the expression of personal experience.
Throughout the episode with Group 2, the teacher keeps control of the poem
through her posture of leaning over the piece of paper, her body acting as a barrier
to the students on her left, her gaze directed nearly exclusively at the poem, talking
for the students as though speaking on their behalf, and scribing the talk that she
has herself produced (though on their behalf), maintaining a near-constant gestural
96 English in Urban Classrooms
contact with the copy of the poem, through its physical proximity to her. This is in
stark contrast to the ‘handing over’ of the text in her interaction with the previous
group of students, in which the students were able to share access to and even at
times have control of the text.
Writing
Here we are particularly interested in who holds the pen in the work of writing.
For the lesson, students had been asked make annotations on the meaning of the
poem, and this was the only writing expected during the group session.
Throughout the interaction at Table 1, writing was a mode used by the students,
not by the teacher. Sofia wrote throughout, Najma wrote towards the end of interaction; and Iqbal did not write at all during the episode. In Group 2 likewise much
writing was done. The difference here is that it was the teacher who did the work,
appropriating Tony’s pencil.
Throughout the interaction with Group 2, the teacher writes on the poem-sheet;
none of the students writes themselves. The teacher underlines and writes single words
and simple phrases on the poem-sheet (for example: Ganges = river; Thou = you;
Flood = Noah’s flood; Conversion of the Jews = ancient history and bible stories).
At Table 1 the students shared one dictionary. When the teacher joins Group 2,
there are four dictionaries on the table, three of which are open at the start of the
episode, although one student closes his dictionary as teacher sits down. The teacher
had distributed the dictionaries earlier in the lesson, at which point she apparently
decided that four were needed on Group 2’s table, and just one on the other. This
distribution of dictionaries itself suggests the teacher’s expectations of each group’s
capacities in relation to the task in hand – clarifying the meaning of the poem. The
dominant presence of the dictionaries on this table suggests that she regarded them
as an essential resource for this particular group, indicating her different understanding of the pedagogic task of making sense of the poem for these students. Each
of them is to undertake the work of finding words in the dictionary; it seems that the
task that the teacher regards them as capable of doing is this mechanical one in which
the dictionary is the essential support. For Group 1, the task seems different, so that
the role of the dictionary becomes a different one: here the teacher facilitates discussion and speculation, and she herself quickly looks up words for them herself.
Halfway through the episode with Group 2, the teacher taps on one of the dictionaries with the pencil, and instructs the students to ‘look up vegetable in the
dictionary’. The students pick up the dictionaries and – in a desultory manner –
flick through the pages. While they do this, the teacher silently reads the poem and
underlines empire. She asks the students ‘What’s an empire?’ One student, Peter,
responds: ‘It’s like a big kingdom’. The teacher leans forward and writes on the
poem-sheet. However, one could not say that the teacher is simply acting as a
scribe for the students, for while some of the meanings of words were offered by
the students or co-produced with the teacher, nearly half of them were provided by
the teacher directly, without attempting any interaction at all with the group.
The pedagogic construction of ‘ability’ 97
At Table 2, writing interacts with other modes to signify the teacher’s continuing possession of the text. With this group the teacher sees it as her role to write
for the students, in contrast to her role in the previous interaction, where she looked
up words in the dictionary for the students while allowing them to focus on relating
the poem to their own experience.
Talk
If we look at this in bare numerical terms, we note that in Group 1 the teacher made
34 contributions, mainly focusing on the meaning of words and phrases. Sofia
spoke almost as many times (33), largely concerned with the sociocultural context
of the poem and the emotional motivation of the female character. Iqbal spoke 16
times, again focusing on the assumed extratextual context. Najma spoke only 3
times, again on the motivation of the woman in the poem. While Najma contributes
little more than any of the students in Group 2, the sort of English to which she has
access at her table is of a different order to that constructed in the other group.
In Group 2, the numerical distribution of utterances is very different, with the
teacher, at points, conducting a dialogue between herself-as-teacher and herselfas-spokesperson for the students. The teacher asks far fewer questions of the
students here than in the previous episode. The students do not ask the teacher any
questions. This lack of questioning is paralleled in the lack of eye contact between
teacher and students.
With Group 2, the teacher spoke 22 times, focusing on the meaning of specific
words. She asked 11 questions, with Tony answering 10 of them, Peter answering 1
and Hassan and Chris answering none, all in response to these direct questions on
vocabulary. The teacher and the students are involved in an entirely teacher-led interaction. The students do not express ideas about alternative or shared meanings about
the poem, and the teacher does not invite a dialogue that goes beyond the barest
requirements of the official curriculum. Towards the end of this episode, as the last
three lines of the poem are ‘discussed’, the teacher and the students are all looking at
the text, although it is the teacher who writes, reads the poem, and offers a response to
the poem. She appears to be modelling ‘doing annotating a poem’ for the students.
‘An age at least to every part’. Erm, an age, that means like a sort of, a
sort of, well I think he means there … like a period of time, like a generation or
something. Yeah. ‘And the last age should show your heart’. So that’s actually
her revealing her love. ‘For lady you deserve this state, nor would I love at
lower rate’. OK, so that’s just basically how much love … yeah
SUSAN:
As in the appropriation of the pencil in writing for the students, here the teacher
also speaks for the students. Yet what she models for the group is atomistic, a
starkly simplified version of ‘comprehension’, and one unlikely to help them
achieve more than a basic grade in their GCSE assessment.
98 English in Urban Classrooms
Conclusion
In Group 1, the teacher and the students talk about the poem and are involved in a
discussion about its meaning; the students ask questions and offer responses. One
of the students writes throughout the episode, and reads the poem aloud. The
students’ and teacher’s use of gaze and gesture expresses their response to the
poem, including gestures that link the poem, their body and the dictionary.
Throughout, the students interact physically with the poem. Through this use of
modes the teacher and the students are involved in a genuine dialogue, and what is
produced is ‘English as discussion’, in which text relates to extracurricular
knowledge and their lives.
In Group 2, the students’ take-up of modal resources is completely different.
The students do not gesture during the episode. Indeed they do not touch the poem
itself, but engage with the dictionary (‘Look up the word vegetable’). They hardly
speak, and when they do it is in response to the teacher’s questions. The students do
not read the poem aloud or read from the dictionary. Nor do they write. They
hardly look at the teacher and the teacher’s gaze is primarily directed at the poem.
The teacher reads parts of the poem aloud, and writes on the poem-text. The poemas-text is foregrounded by the actions of the teacher; the students-as-people are
backgrounded. The stark inequality of the modal resources used by the teacher and
the students produces a sparse notion of ‘English as comprehension through
instruction’. They are left to their silent response of resistance and disengagement,
expressed through gaze, posture, and gesture. This is a striking similarity with
teacher–student interaction in the ‘low-ability’ class in the streamed school
described earlier in this chapter.
It seems clear to us that English is produced in different ways with different
groups of students. That is, what the original designers of the National Curriculum
called ‘the same broad and balanced curriculum’ takes on deeply different meanings,
even within the same classroom. For us what produces these different kinds of
English is the combination of many factors, but importantly it is high-stakes testing,
and demands for performance, which sets a classroom agenda where teachers want
to achieve at least some minimal level of success for all of their students. Alongside
this is a highly specified National Curriculum, which seems to allow for little local
inflection in response to local needs and interests, and particularly so where teachers
are anxious about the ‘ability’ of their students. Another important factor is the
decreasing autonomy of teachers to make decisions about pacing, content, values
and, importantly, the continuation of longer-standing discourses and practices
relating to differentiation on grounds of assumptions about fixed and innate levels of
‘ability’, which act as sorting mechanisms for both overt and covert social sifting.
In this chapter we have attempted to show how these different entities are
produced socially, and given their actualization multimodally. They are not so
much embedded in the curriculum’s formal content as enacted in classrooms, with
teachers and students deploying a range of semiotic resources to make, and to
contest, forms of English.
Chapter 7
The social production of character
as an entity of school English
The social production of character
Introduction
In the previous chapter we looked at different versions of English, produced as a
result, we suggested, of different conceptions of ‘ability’ held by teachers about
their students. We concluded, perhaps too pessimistically, that one – among
others – factor in this might be the diminishing autonomy of teachers under the
‘new dispensations’.
In this chapter we turn our focus somewhat differently, to look at one example of
how what we call the ‘curriculum entities’ of English are produced in different
classrooms. By ‘curriculum entity’ we mean those curricular ‘objects’, ‘processes’
and ‘relations’ that constitute that which is the curriculum. Entities are the abstract
concepts that we use to think with in different subjects. In this sense they constitute
the subject as a school subject. In school science there are entities such as the water
cycle, blood-circulation, electrons and wave-forms, which make up that curriculum, and there are processes which establish how these entities come about, and
how they relate to each other and to the world (Kress et al. 2001). So in English,
too, there are entities having broadly the function of constituting the school subject
English: the significant literary and non-literary genres, the technical terms
whereby we understand meaning and the world (metaphor, simile, analogy, for
example), the modes for making meaning (such as speech and writing, texts and
the entities of texts), syntactic and grammatical entities such as sentence and
clause, noun and verb, subject and object, as well as the means for dissemination of
meaning, the media such as book and screen, and so on.
In examining the entities of English, we are also focusing more directly on a
different and for us crucial question, namely the question of the degree of ‘movement’ or ‘play’, of freedom or autonomy that might still remain with agents of
different kinds – schools, students, parents, teachers and others – in shaping
English. As we said in Chapter 2, all this is set against the background of a quite
clear political, social, economic and pedagogic movement. This background is
encoded in the National Curriculum, but also in other policy moves, such as the
Key Stage 3 Literacy Strategy, which, in changing the curriculum profoundly,
have also had the effect of changing the relations in institutional education, and, as
100 English in Urban Classrooms
just one example in the case of English, of making the English curriculum much
more ‘explicit’. One way of seeing this is to think that the aim is to make the
English curriculum much more like the science curriculum in terms of explicitness, by setting out clearly what the entities of the English curriculum as well as
their relations to each other are.
In this chapter, we focus on one such ‘entity’, the entity character. We want to
show how such an entity (as an example of how this would be with any entity) is
actually produced in the English classroom, and how the social and organizational
arrangements of the school and of its environments in all senses affect its production. We focus both on the attributes and features that are ascribed to character in
the National Curriculum, and on how this is produced, ‘inflected’, differently in
the classrooms that we observed. Through the analysis of classroom data, of interviews with teachers, and of school policies we develop our argument that the
conditions for developing different potentials for English are always more than a
matter of an individual teacher’s philosophies or teaching style. Nonetheless the
agencies of the teacher, of departments, of students and of schools remain significant in telling ways. We argued for instance in Chapter 6 that aspects of certain
pedagogic discourses such as notions of ‘ability’ held in the school develop in relation to such specific matters as the admission policies, and the streaming and
setting policies of schools, which closely link to that. We describe how character
appears differently in the different schools that participated in the research, and we
focus in detail on two schools: Springton School and Ravenscroft School.
We go beyond simply documenting how an entity appears, in order to show how
the particular shape of a curriculum entity, such as character – though we might
have chosen others – impacts on the potentials for learning. We provide a detailed
multimodal analysis of the realization of character as seen in the teacher–student
interaction we found in two classrooms. We conclude that the social relations of
the school, the subjectivities of the learners and the form of English itself are intimately connected with the realization or actualization of curriculum entities; they
provide one means of access to an understanding of the production of the subject
itself in a school.
‘Character’ and the English curriuclum
The entity character is central to English in its relation to literature. It is highlighted in the history and development of English as a school subject, emphasized
by its prominence in the National Curriculum, as in the classrooms we observed.
English Literature as an academic subject (as opposed to the ‘classics’) began in
the working men’s colleges of Britain. The emphasis was on the transmission of
moral values through literature to the working class. That had been an essential
part of the ideological project of English advanced by the work of, among others,
F.H. Bradley and F.R. Leavis (Eagleton 1983). For Leavisites, as for others –
Marxists for instance – literature and society were intimately bound together. In
such approaches the very stuff of ideology is seen as reflected in (great) works of
The social production of character 101
literature. Colleges and schools encouraged a close engagement with literature to
enable the communication of strong moral values through its texts. Such literature, it was thought, offered the potential for students to discover a spiritual home,
and ultimately to discover the self through reading it: ‘[to] know how they came to
be as they, very idiosyncratically, are’ (Kermode 1979: 15). Throughout the
twentieth century, the traditional notion of the study of character as a means for
knowing oneself has underpinned an oblique form of moral education in British
schools.
The residue of this legacy persists in the current (official, though in many cases,
also unofficial) English curriculum. In its broadest sense this legacy is embedded
in the National Curriculum’s focus on ‘promoting pupils’ spiritual, moral, social
and cultural development through English’ (DfEE 1999: 8). More specifically, it is
realized through the inclusion and exclusion of particular authors and texts, as we
discuss in Chapter 10. The study of set texts is a central element of English. GCSE
English coursework and examination includes the demand for responding to a set
text by recommended major authors. The English National Curriculum
programme and assessment schema both highlight ‘character’ as a core entity.
Understanding character is explicitly specified as central to a critical and creative
response to a range of texts. Students are expected to demonstrate how character is
constructed through an author’s choice and style of language. They are assessed on
their ability to make comparisons between the characters in a text and their role in
the narrative, and to demonstrate the motivation and behaviour of a character
through the analysis of a text (DfEE 1999).
In Ravenscroft School the importance of character is enshrined at the level of
school policy. For example, policy on teachers’ assessment lists key skills that
should be developed and assessed in English. These include the ‘ability to write
stories that portray and develop character’ and to ‘take on the persona of a character’ as well as to ‘be able to understand and analyse characterization in plays and
critical writing’. The concept of character provided a strong framing focus in the
lessons that we observed, although it was produced in many different ways.
We think it is important to understand how an entity is produced because the
modal realization and the communicational form that curriculum entities are given
are key dimensions in the shaping of knowledge. In turn this shapes the potential
for students’ engagement with texts; and that potential has its effects on possibilities for learning. In other words, curriculum entities, how they are produced and
realized, provide different kinds of resources for the production of knowledge and
subjectivity in the English classroom.
While the curricular entities of English may be set out in policy documents, they
are produced in the social domain of the classroom. Hence how the entity character is constructed – what is ‘brought (in)to it’, what features and attributes are
ascribed to it – depends on which social domain rules the classroom: Is it that of the
everyday of the students, for instance, as in one of the schools (Wayford)
described? Or is it that brought by teachers as their (explicit or implicit) conception
of English? Or is it that of policy, made somewhere away from the locality of the
102 English in Urban Classrooms
classroom, away from the ethos of departments, the professional formation of
teachers, away from the demands and needs of the social environments of schools
(as in Springton perhaps)? In other words, one deciding factor in this production is
which world and whose cultural capital rule in its formation – to use the terms of
Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein. We said in Chapter 3 that the social relations
of the school are expressed in the pedagogy of the classroom, but they are
expressed just as much, if differently, in the form of the curricular entities that are
produced in the classroom.
The entity character is a part of the (official and unofficial) curriculum and is at
the same time not at all fully determined by it, in the sense that it is actually very
weakly specified in and by either official or unofficial curricula. In terms of modes,
we can ask: is it talked about, acted out, written about, shown, or drawn in cartoonstrips? Epistemologically, we can ask: is it naturalized into an everyday realism,
does it have a larger metaphorical effect, a moral or ethical function, does it have a
theoretical force – is it strongly linked to and dependent on the social relations that
obtain in the classroom?
This is one point where official policy and local practice can – and in our data
often do – part company. Policy is general; classrooms are local and specific. The
National Curriculum is an attempt by government at establishing a common,
unified, social constituency; the actual constituency, however, is very much that
which is on the ground. What is on the ground, especially in urban contexts, is
difference, the effects of the multitudinous forces described under that broad term
‘globalization’, for instance (see Beck (1992) and others). It is at this point that the
school’s and the department’s policies enter into the picture to mediate national
policy. Here, especially, policy around admissions and streaming becomes crucial.
While we base our discussion in the rest of this chapter on two main illustrative
examples to describe how character was realized in two classrooms, one taken
from each school, at times we will draw on examples from other classrooms.
Among other things this will allow us to show just how different the productions of
the ‘same’ entity are in different schools. For example, to show how each fits into
what school English is in the different classrooms and what kind of student work is
demanded and enabled – or ruled out. Or, how character is shaped as performance
through the use of space, and movement in space – whether in the classroom, in the
amphitheatre or the drama studio – and the other modal resources that the teacher
stipulates or the students bring.
The multimodal production of character
Here we shift to a description and analysis at the micro-level of the production of
the entity character in two schools. Taking one English lesson from Springton
School and Ravenscroft School in turn, we analyse the way in which character is
produced through teacher–student interaction. The discourses about character
that are active in the construction of this English curriculum entity are apparent in
the quite different modal realizations in each of the two classrooms. We examine
The social production of character 103
what features of English are emphasized through the interpersonal relationships
configured by the teacher’s organization of classroom interaction; we focus on the
position that students are offered by forms of English in each lesson. We explore
how National Curriculum, exam syllabus, and son on, are inflected in encounters
between teachers and students. Finally, we comment on how the work of the
teachers is shaped (and generated by) their attempts to relate the forms of knowledge and subjectivity encoded in English to the interests of students, via the
complex demands of the National Curriculum, official policy, school tradition,
and the teachers’ ‘formation’.
Through our analysis we are led to conclude that the admissions policy of selection and of ability streaming at Ravenscroft School produces a classroom in which
a social domain is established for teacher and students in which the teacher’s
values are dominant. The teacher transmits her view of English to her class as a
whole. In a seeming paradox, as a result, the teacher is able to incorporate (or
subordinate) the official curriculum version of English into her own approach to
English as a school subject. Here, the teacher constructs character by fluidly
moving between her knowledge of the social domain of the students’ everyday
experience of the school as an institution, and the teacher’s world; between her
version of the curriculum and the official version. Yet the social and
epistemological domain is hers. The official curriculum is mediated through, even
subordinated to, the teacher’s values.
This is quite different in Springton School, which operates without a policy of
selection or ability-based streaming (see Chapter 6). Here, where the students are
seen as a diverse group with diverse needs, the official version of the curriculum is
dominant. The teacher does not put forward her ‘own sense of English’. Rather,
her attempt seems to be to mediate the official curriculum to the students, but, also
paradoxically as it seems, by moving it onto the grounds of the social domain of
what she thinks is the students’ experience. Hence it appears that student experience is used to mediate official curriculum. Ravenscroft, having adopted a policy
of selection, can be confident that students have come to the school knowing that to
be an achievement; the teachers in the school can respond by confidently offering
school knowledge as valuable. In Springton that knowledge and hence that confidence is absent; the value of the school’s knowledge has to be achieved by some
other means.
Springton School: character – Romeo and Juliet
We have discussed this school already in some detail, in Chapter 6. Here, the
activity of ‘reading’ is used as a means of understanding and actualizing what
character is. In general, character is seen as an entity that is ‘just there’, as it
were, in the text: it is realized via performance, in voice and gesture, and by other
means. It is available as an experience. Characters have their place in a play, and
are presented by the teacher as something unproblematic, to be performed; it is the
actualization of character that is the crucial aspect of the performance.
104 English in Urban Classrooms
In this classroom character is not a problematic entity, relatively speaking. It is
not a matter so much of establishing what this notion might be; instead, the focus is
on producing the entity in and through action, via the use of the modes and the
material forms that need to be involved: of voice, (facial) gestures, the body. The
understanding of character is related to a quite immediately available level: characters are (like) ‘persons’. So the teacher informs the students that they will be
assessed on ‘how well they put the feelings of the characters across’. This takes it
as given that character is ‘there’, and that a character ‘has’ specific feelings. The
task therefore is to actualize what these feelings are, to show ‘the feelings’. What
the larger or deeper meanings of these feelings might be is not the issue here. That
character might be a construct, a potential to be used and shaped, to be transformed by the students in their actualization of this potential-for-meaning – these
are not questions. Rather, the question asked by the teacher, Julia, is ‘what is the
motivation, what motivates them, what’s pushing them forward?’ Students are
encouraged by the teacher to ‘try and see behind the character – why they are doing
what they’re doing’, ‘what you think each person is thinking and feeling and what
actions you think they might be doing or what tone of voice’. A second(ary) task is
then to annotate the script with this information, which might then be ‘right’ or
‘wrong’, depending on other evidence found in the text.
Character is and remains a concrete entity; it is not presented as a construct, an
artifice, it is not a metaphor for something other or larger or deeper. Hence the text
as written is central, although the move in teaching about character is away from
writing and towards action. Here English exists as the performance of written text.
The students are involved in realizing the character multimodally, but they are not
encouraged to reflect on the function of character in a larger, a more abstract
sense: understanding remains at the level of the surface of the play/text.
So in Springton, character is produced as an explicit and quite concrete entity.
Rather than teacher and students working collaboratively to construct this concept, the
teacher, Julia, presents it to the students as a ready-made set of features and attributes.
The task of the students is to ‘fill in’ these features provided by the teacher. Their task
is to bring character ‘to life’ through their performance, to ‘make the character real’
through their engagement with, and performance of, its emotions and motivations.
Character is realized as a discrete ‘unit’ of the play; so the question of the function of
character in a play is not a part of its construction in this classroom. The separation of
the entity character from the (meaning of the) play as text is heightened by an exclusive focus on one scene of the play – Romeo and Juliet (Act I, Scene v).
The students are not asked to read the whole play, rather they work with a photocopy of the text of this one scene. This fragmentation of the play in the lesson
mirrors the modularization of the curriculum – Shakespeare is there as a culturally
iconic figure; yet his texts exist simply as ‘fragments of text’, to be mined for the
technical purposes of the curriculum. In this classroom the dominant realization
modes for character are movement, body posture, gesture, facial expression, and
speech; in the classroom we discuss below, in Ravenscroft, the dominant realization modes for character by contrast are speech and writing.
The social production of character 105
After the students have read the scene, the teacher enquires how many of them
‘understood the text’: her own initial estimate and suggestion is ‘about 20 per
cent’. The assessment of what constitutes ‘understanding’ is seemingly straightforward enough to be quantified. Beyond this, the teacher does nothing with the
idea of understanding. The students are being encouraged into becoming assessors
of ‘understanding’ themselves.
We wonder why the teacher turns the comprehension of English-as-performance
into a competition? There is no doubt that she is concerned to ensure that the
students should have an ‘understanding’ at this level by making links to ‘the world
outside’. For instance, she by takes the word ‘pilgrimage’ out of the text of Romeo
and Juliet and, taking it entirely literally, she gets the students to define what the
word ‘pilgrimage’ means via their own experiences, from knowledge gained
outside the school.
TEACHER:
STUDENT:
Can anyone tell me what a pilgrim is?
Yeah, that’s a Haj thing.
A student offers the term ‘Haj’ and the teacher accepts it, but she does not then
encourage the students to contribute their own understandings of what a Haj or
pilgrimage might mean to them, and how this might illuminate the text. The concern
in Springton School is ‘by what means can I get the students to satisfy – even if minimally for some – the requirements of the National Curriculum?’ This often comes
down to cursory, superficial definitions of vocabulary, as in the example of ‘looking
up’ the word ‘vegetable’ we saw in the previous chapter. The text is and yet is not
linked into the out-of-school lives of the students. The glossing of the word ‘Haj’
comes from the world outside; but nothing more is done with that other knowledge.
In this way English is produced as a set of competencies rather than as a means for
going further, no matter what the textual materials at issue might be.
We have no wish to place responsibility for this on the teacher alone. What we
see here is a new conception of English as constituted for the ‘less able’, in which
the aim is the achievement of basic attainment targets; an attempt at satisfying
performance criteria. For the teacher, achievement lies in the security of predicting
attainable outcomes for her students. These outcomes focus on creating a synopsis
of the text at the most basic level; on demonstrating understanding rather than
interpretation. There are complex issues here, which circle around notions of
equity, and what these might be seen to mean in relation to this school – its student
population and its teachers.
Ravenscroft: character, admissions policy and streaming –
The Crucible
The collaborative production of character in this classroom of Ravenscroft School
is a complex process. In order to attain the highest grade in examination, the curriculum assessment criteria require that students understand the play, its events and
106 English in Urban Classrooms
Mode:
speech and
written modes
visual mode
0
Focus: graph
30
film
60
book
Figure 7.1 Ravenscroft School, representation of modes in use during Diane’s lesson
characters as complex signs, to go beyond the text, to read between the lines; and
this is precisely what this teacher expects from the class. While other modes are in
use in the lesson, the dominant modes for the realization of character are speech and
writing. Character is not performed here; rather, it is talked into being.
Character is never explicitly defined by the teacher, and therefore the sense of
what this entity is remains open and somewhat elusive. In the lesson we discuss here,
the construction of character is used to draw the students into a discussion of the
philosophical and political arguments that Arthur Miller develops in The Crucible.
Character is produced as a vehicle that serves the interests of the play; something
that ‘emerges’ through events and dialogue; as a sense that is woven throughout its
structure; as a web of references, including references to the students’ experiences of
life. It is altogether a much more abstract notion of character, not concretely there to
be ‘read off’ the text, but emergent in the play’s actions, relations and processes.
In the first half of the lesson the teacher and students summarize ‘where we have
got to so far’. This ‘summary’ is a recapitulation of the play, a multimodal reshaping
of the play via the multimodal medium of film – in speech, enactment and image – to
produce a shared version of the text-as-meaning, and the entity character as a tool in
relation to issues around the planned coursework. (The coursework took the form of
an essay discussing the character John Proctor in relation to a comment by Miller: ‘It
takes an individual conscience to stop the whole world from falling’.) In the second
half of the lesson the teacher works to establish the framework for this coursework.
Here the modal realization is entirely through writing and speech.
Represented as a time-line, the dominant modes and focuses of the lesson are
schematically indicated in Figure 7.1.
Multimodally, image is foregrounded in the first half of the lesson, which
contrasts sharply with the modal foregrounding of speech and writing in the
second half. This shift in modal realization can be understood as a shift in the pedagogic concern and framing of English in the lesson, from ‘English-as-pleasure’ or
entertainment – based on a much more sensory approach – to English as technical
or theoretical competency and skills, with an examination focus. Here there is a
much more technical, instrumental approach. In the first half of the lesson the play
and its meaning is foregrounded; the demands of the curriculum remain in the
background. In the second half, the reverse is true. The shift to curricular concerns
demands a shift from English as abstract and a matter of elusive sensibility, to
English as specific and concrete. This entails a shift from reading and interpretation to production for the examination.
The social production of character 107
‘Plotting’ character
The lesson starts with the teacher asking the students to consider what ‘the play might
look like as a graph’. She draws two axes on the whiteboard, and labels the vertical
axis ‘hysteria’ and the horizontal axis ‘as the acts progress’, that is, what is mapped is
a theme – intensity of emotion – against the chronology of the play. She marks
discrete units on the horizontal axis: ‘Act 1’, ‘Act 2’, Act 3’ and ‘Act 4’. The teacher
then asks the students ‘Where would you have me draw my line – “hysterical”being
right at the top?’ and moves her pen, hovering, up and down the vertical axis.
Down.
Down [she moves her pen down the line]. About here?
STUDENT: Yes.
TEACHER: OK. And as the play goes along where would you want me to draw it?
STUDENT: Up, up [teacher starts to draw line].
TEACHER: Continuing up?
STUDENT: To boiling point.
TEACHER: Continuing up to boiling point, which is about there [teacher draws
X on the graph and then draws a vertical line down from the X to the horizontal axis], the end of Act 3. You could say that for it to continually rise and
maybe you’d say there’s some ups and downs…
STUDENT:
TEACHER:
The teacher’s use of a graph to represent features of the play is, we think,
epistemologically noteworthy. It moves the forms of analysis from the domain of the
literary, humanistic, subjective to the domain of the mathematical, scientific, objective; from the modes and genres of speech – such as talk, conversation, debate – to
the modes and genres of the visual – such as graph, chart, diagram – outside the
usual genres of English. The teacher’s choice of a visual genre leaning on the scientific or technological – a graph – to represent the development of the action of the
play can be read as a visual marker of a suggestion for the students to stand back, to
generalize and to ‘objectively’ analyse the play in terms of ‘empirical evidence’. The
abstract character of the graph enables specific events within the play to be ‘plotted’,
in this case the relation of emotion (hysteria), against the progress of the play over
time – much as one can plot rainfall or temperature. In this way the abstract entity
‘dramatic structure’ is brought into existence in a very specific way, and in a very
specific domain, not traditionally that of English, around the character John Proctor.
Traces of a scientific syntax and genre are present in her speech – for example, ‘level
off’ and ‘variables’ – and, as we will point out, in visual-gestural form.
Then we are at the Proctor’s house again, aren’t we? [The teacher points
at the graph with her pen at the section of the line above Act 2.] Act 2, so it kind of
does level off here [draws a horizontal line] where we see the home life. But even
that has variables in it [teacher draws a wiggly line over the horizontal line]
because we see the sort of difficult relationship between Proctor and his wife.
TEACHER:
108 English in Urban Classrooms
Figure 7.2
Diane’s graphic representation of The Crucible
Drawing on (and pointing at) the graph (see Figure 7.2) the teacher visually
places her (and the students’) verbal account of specific events in the larger context
of the play as graphed.
The teacher’s iterative movement between the abstract generalized representation of the play as image on the whiteboard and her verbal account of concrete
events actualize character as a multimodal sign of the complex relationship
between themes realized in events and structure in time. Her activity indicates that
character both needs to be understood within the structure of the play as a whole
and at the same time as a part of the processes of the construction of the structure of
the play. The teacher asks the students a series of questions that focus on signification: these highlight what the teacher considers to be the importance of particular
passages and themes in the play, and explores how they are lodged in and realized
through character. This also conveys the deeper curricular message that the
The social production of character 109
students are to understand the events in the play as having meaning beyond the
events themselves. For example:
Can anyone remember something John Proctor says to, um, what
would you say he does, a couple of things he does to show us, the audience,
what does Arthur Miller show us, the audience, to show that there’s a bit of an
uncomfortable relationship between them?
STUDENT: He comes into the house and straight away he puts salt in the food
like, and when she comes down stairs she says ‘I’m sure it’s seasoned well’.
TEACHER: Yeah, they’re obviously not communicating very well. She thinks
she’s cooked him this lovely dinner, taking great – she says she’s taken great
care to season it properly. He comes in tastes it [teacher enacts holding a
spoon to her mouth] and goes ‘urgh’ [teacher makes a facial expression of
disgust] and puts some salt in it. There’s obviously some mismatch of their
relationship. What else? Shika?
S: He talks about bringing flowers into the house cos he says ‘it’s like winter in
here’ meaning, referring to their relationship – the cold.
TEACHER:: Yeah, yeah, excellent, excellent. And finally, I don’t know if anyone
remembers but he says ‘what about a cup of cider’ and she’s like ‘Oh God I
forgot something’ [teacher acts out frustration through gesture and facial
expression] and its like they’re really trying to please each other but they have
a very strained relationship. And we learn in Act 3 [gestures at graph] why
their relationship starts to go wrong.
The teacher, Diane, continues with her recount of the play; she selects incidents
that establish the centrality of the character of John Proctor. This recount provides
a filter for the students who will be watching the film later in the lesson, as well as
for the coursework that she is going to set. The recount is established collaboratively – the students supply quotes and extracts from the play to fill out the
account. The teacher draws on the students’ memory of the play and enacts their
quotes through her voice, performative gestures and other movement. In this way
the teacher and the students construct an account of the play that is structured
around a specific notion of character. At the same time this produces the character
and the play as a text with a particular shape. Specifically, the teacher draws on
events in the play that highlight the conflict and contradictions within the character
of John Proctor. Here the modal realization of character through speech allows it to
be placed in the domain of ‘the past’, whereas when the teacher acts out the play
she acts it out as in ‘the present’. The movement between modes is used to produce
an analytic process – the shift between tenses (verbally and visually) encourages
reflectivity. The performance itself makes the play into ‘data’.
The teacher uses her interaction with the students to overlay the graph with
specific details of events in the play. Character is realized as an abstract entity that
exists beyond the particular characters as people in the play. The teacher produces
character as a vehicle for the meanings of the play itself. The graph is a visual
resource that the teacher uses to mediate between the abstract entity character and
TEACHER:
110 English in Urban Classrooms
the concrete character John Proctor in the play. The teacher’s iterative movement
between the graph and the concrete character realized in the play places character
clearly within the realm of the abstract, the moral and ethical, and makes it clear
that this character has a role beyond the realization of ‘just a person, just a man’.
The teacher draws on the personalities of the students themselves in the
construction of this entity. When ‘casting’ the roles in the play, she considered the
‘characteristics’ of the students and drew on that knowledge in her ‘casting’. In
doing so, the teacher was drawing on a different notion of character, as a sense of
being or essence that connects with a sense of self. She draws on the personal experiences of the students as a resource to explore character. For instance, to
explore the students’ understanding of the motivation of John Proctor’s wife in
lying for him, she asks the students if they have ever lied for a friend. The teacher
calls on a student whose name teachers consistently mispronounce in order to
focus on the importance of names, and names as a vehicle for identity. The teacher
weaves in the school experiences of the students as a resource for their understanding of the character John Proctor. In this way she is using the students’ experiences as a resource to mediate the text, and using the text as a resource to mediate
the social relations of the classroom.
Film: the multimodal realization of character
When the class watches the film of the play, there is a definite, noticeable shift in
seating position and posture, indicating that the manner of engagement has
shifted, from ‘work’ to ‘leisure’. There is no note-taking, for instance, and
students feel free to sit on desks – the general ambience has become casual.
The teacher continues to develop the notions of ‘name’ and ‘character’ as evident
through the film version (for which Miller wrote the screenplay) of The Crucible.
The students watch Act 4 of the play – the court scene, which they had read in the
previous lesson. The teacher’s selection of two excerpts from the film focuses their
attention on the character John Proctor. The teacher mediates the students’ viewing
by her talk, and the use of the remote control to show ‘significant moments’.
Through this she is, literally, shaping what they see. The abstract notion of character previously realized in the graph is now instantiated in the realist, filmically
shown incidents of character.
Below is a description of the teacher’s use of the second excerpt of the film.
The teacher stops the video and stands with her hand leaning on the filing
cabinet on which the TV stands, and she addresses the students from there:
TEACHER: What I’m going to let you see just very quickly is John Proctor’s
absolute fury at the end, which is understandable with all this action. I mean
some of you vaguely laughed, some of you kind of go ‘God this is ridiculous’.
Isn’t it obvious that every time someone picks on Abigail she suddenly goes
‘Ahhh’ [the teacher swivels around quickly and points as if accusing
someone] that’s her strategy.
The teacher fast-forwards the video tape.
The social production of character 111
If you look at the end at John Proctor’s complete fury at the whole, he says
things.
She stops fast-forwarding the tape. On the film at this point the crowd is
running out of the town. John Proctor says ‘I know this girl she is entirely
false’. The teacher continues to fast-forward the video.
T: Now in this in the film version they run off into the sea as if they’re going to
wash themselves clean. This is where John Proctor really…
The teacher fast-forwards the video, then plays the video. On the film, it is
the scene at the sea in which Mary Warren accuses John Proctor of working
with the Devil. Throughout the scene John Proctor is framed as separate from
the crowd and his accusers – first in close up and as his accusers speak in the
distance against the horizon. In response to the accusations he says the lines:
‘I say you are pulling heaven down and raising up a whore. I say God is
dead!’ The teacher switches off the video.
S: [Groan]
T: OK.
S: I say God is dead! Is it a demon, ha ha ha!
T: Right, back to your seats quickly then.
The teacher’s selective showing of the video structures what sense of John Proctor’s character she wants the students to get. The visual realization of John Proctor
– through the use of framing, of shot-distance, and so on – literally sets him apart
from the mob. The filmic image of him standing alone in the sea, confronted by the
hysterically screaming mob is a multimodal realization of the Miller quotation that
the teacher later writes on the board: ‘It takes an individual conscience to stop the
whole world from falling’. The film provides a clear vision of John Proctor as
tragic hero, which the written text of the play does not provide quite so starkly. In
this way the film provides an interpretative overlay for the students’ earlier reading
of the play and steers them toward the coursework.
The film offers the students a version of the entity character with which they
may be more familiar and confident. It is constructed as something realized
through performance, involving action, voice, set, and so on. The film further ‘fills
in’ the meaning of the graph – it acts as evidence for the teacher’s selective account
of the play to produce her notion of character, evidence of the emotional and affective, as well as the moral and ethical aspects of character. But the students are not
expected to produce this version in the classroom. Reading a play is one way of
producing character; however, in this lessons the students are not asked to perform
the play though their reading – they are not asked to use voice, gesture, movement
in their realization of the character. (When the students did bring voice as a
resource to their reading they were praised by the teacher – however, this had not
been made explicit; it had not been a requirement for her.)
The film provides a connection between the students’ highly visual textual
world outside of the school and the written textual world of the English classroom.
But the recontextualization of the film into the classroom is transformative – the
film is not experienced in the English classroom as it would be at home or in a
112 English in Urban Classrooms
cinema. Through the classroom interaction the film is temporarily transformed
from an everyday text, from a Hollywood film in the realm of leisure, into a
specialized text in the realm of English literature. The film is made an object of
study; it is analysed by various means, it is fast-forwarded, it is talked-over, it is
discussed as a script, compared to the play. Above all, what is made significant in
this work by the teacher is character. That is, character is produced as an entity
that can travel across media – realized in play, film, written text, and even in the
students themselves.
Summary
Through the graph, the recounting of specific instances via talk and ‘performative
enactment’, and the showing of the film, the teacher expressed the theme of
human consciousness via the entity character. The overt theme of witchcraft is
suppressed in the teacher’s recasting of the play. Her intent had been to produce
character in quite a different way, beyond the surface, beyond the concrete
instance of the ‘person’; she did not want the students to come away from the play
thinking that it was about witchcraft. She wanted them to see character as a means
to understanding larger and more profound themes.
Writing character
Halfway into the lesson the rhetorical framing of the lesson changes markedly.
The teacher stops the video, turns on the lights, and instructs the students to go
back to their seats. She stands at the front of the classroom. The teacher’s tone of
voice and her use of words are now markedly different to that of the first half of
the lesson – she uses short sentences, with an instructional purpose. Now character moves into the frame of coursework-writing – a quite new frame. Before
this, the overt objective of the lesson had been one of her making: character, or
The Crucible. Now the frame of the lesson has completely changed: this is represented through shift in mode, a shift in medium, and a shift in activity from collective to individual. The work of the students is now to produce a written account,
foregrounding the demands of the official curriculum and of coursework:
This is the part where you need your books. I’m going to write some
things on the board and I’m going to say them aloud as I go along and you need
to write them down, OK? We are studying The Crucible [writes ‘The
Crucible’ on the board]. This is our twentieth-century drama [writes ‘C20th
drama’ on board]. Whilst studying our twentieth-century drama and for our
coursework we are asked to consider a number of elements surrounding the
play. Now on its most simple level if someone said to you from another group
what’s The Crucible about … I want you to quickly brainstorm what you
consider The Crucible to be about [she draws a circle with lines coming out of
it, with ‘what is it about’ written in the circle].
TEACHER:
The social production of character 113
This is the first time in the series of lessons that the teacher has explicitly
mentioned the curriculum. Although the curriculum is always present in the classroom, it can be foregrounded or backgrounded. Up until this point it has been
backgrounded, both in terms of contextualizing the play within the curriculum and
in the positioning of the coursework.
The students do the ‘brainstorm’ and then feed back their comments, which the
teacher writes on the board. Moving on from the themes highlighted by the
students, the teacher reads aloud a quote from Arthur Miller from an interview,
which she has previously written on the whiteboard: ‘it takes an individual
conscience to stop the whole world from falling’. She asks the students to ‘play
with it in your head’ and to say what they think it means.
It means it can take a single person to like stop the whole world from
creating, like war and chaos, and it could like take a single person to like
destroy the world. It could take a single person to like create a nuclear bomb.
TEACHER: So the importance of the individual, yes [points to another student].
STUDENT: It’s like if someone realizes that something is wrong and they speak
up about it then other people might also realize that it’s wrong, and stop going
whatever.
TEACHER: It’s got to start somewhere, someone has got to do something, you
can’t keep waiting for another person to have their conscience pricked otherwise you just go on and on, and on, and on. And it only takes one person …
and on the other side, an individual conscience [looks at quotation] …
STUDENT:
The teacher moves on to link the notion of the individual with the character John
Proctor:
John Proctor has a loud voice in his head saying, from the like negative side if you like … look just take your wife just go, just sort yourself out,
you’re just an individual, you can’t do anything, this situation is bigger than
you. Then there is another side of him, saying well, look, someone’s got to put
their foot down and stop it. That line there [points at Miller quotation] ‘It takes
an individual conscience to stop the whole world from falling’ is what Arthur
Miller truly believed he was doing when he was on trial in the McCarthyism
situation in the 1950s with the hunt for the communists …
TEACHER:
The teacher presents the character John Proctor as a realization of the themes of
the play, in the move from the play as a collection of themes, to the notion of the
individual, to the character of John Proctor, to Miller himself. The teacher establishes character as a complex web of connections and references that ‘hold’ the
cultural context of the play, the authorial intent of Arthur Miller, and the themes of
the play. This enables the teacher to move away from the instantiation of character
in the play as a literary phenomenon, and to move the students toward understanding character as an abstract entity – a vehicle for the metaphor of the meaning
114 English in Urban Classrooms
of the play. The teacher goes on to discuss the two sides of the American dream –
as potential to achieve, and as blame for non-achievement – as a metaphor for John
Proctor, and introduces this analogy for thinking about the character of John
Proctor. She presents a way of thinking about character as a vehicle for the social
and cultural context of the play:
So if we look at something with two sides [the teacher stands at the
front of the room and holds her hands and arms in front of her like balancing
scales]: wonderful promise [looks at and moves her right hand], with a frightening other side [moves and looks at her left hand]. If we look at John Proctor
[teacher touches the name written on the whiteboard] he reminds me a bit of that
himself. First thing I wrote down yesterday, and I’m not going to do it all, [teacher
turns and starts to write] I’m just going to do the first, the first thing I wrote down
is that he’s got these great contradictions or conflict within him [writes ‘conflict’],
and I’m going to write contradiction next to it [writes ‘contradiction’].
The teacher starts to walk around as she talks.
On the one hand we have John Proctor the wonderful [clenches her fists and
moves them down] powerful man in his mid-thirties. A hard-working family
man. And on the other hand we have the adulterer, the man who was tempted,
the man who was weak, but John Proctor is the epitome of not being weak in
so many ways. Can anyone think of any other contradictions about him,
anything he says, or anything he does.
STUDENT: When he says it’s cold, it’s icy in here like winter, he’s like saying
his relationship is dead. But when they like come to his house and they’re
questioning him on the commandments, he’s like, yes we know all of them,
he’s like saying we work as a team together, but then it’s like their relationship’s dead.
TEACHER: Yeah, he kind of switches all the time [moves her hands from left to
right] doesn’t he, from being united with his wife, to being critical [walks
backwards, in a distancing manner] in a subtle kind of way.
TEACHER:
The teacher draws attention to other episodes in the play where John Proctor
behaves in a contradictory way, focusing on his attitude to God and the Church.
The students offer her their responses and direct quotations from the play.
There are many many contradictions about what he says, the way he
behaves, the way he quotes the Bible constantly at Mary Warren – ‘remember
the angel Gabriel, blah, blah, blah’ – and then on the other hand he steers away
from the things that he, he becomes part of the fight, you know, to know more
about God, he’s throws God down and then takes it away all the time, because
he is a man torn [holds hands to the side open, as if quartered] in two. Maybe
this play is about justice, about revenge, about all sorts of things that give him
an opportunity to unify himself again, maybe it gives him the opportunity to
be what he always wanted to be, which was the good man.
TEACHER:
The social production of character 115
The teacher then asks the students to brainstorm their notion of the character
John Proctor, focusing on his physical attributes, what is said about him in the play,
what he says, and what the students know about him. She hands out the books: at
this point the class is about 50 minutes into the 60-minute lesson.
In the move from themes of play, to Miller, to character of John Proctor, the
teacher establishes the link between theme, authorial intent, and character. The
themes of the play and the entity character are linked by the sequence of talk, by
the activity of brainstorming, and (visually) by the material on the whiteboard.
Conclusion
We have focused on two examples, from two schools and English departments
with clear and clearly distinct policies around admissions and streaming. In
Springton character is unproblematically ‘there’ in the play text, waiting to be
actualized; in Ravenscroft it is a much more complex notion, to be produced in
relation to the deeper themes of a play. In Springton the teacher tries to help her
students meet the demands of National Curriculum coursework, without
attempting to help them to link their experiences to their understanding of the text,
to enact rather than to interpret text. In Ravenscroft, the teacher relied on her own
understandings of literature and literary thinking, into which she incorporated as
much as was necessary of the National Curriculum for her pupils to succeed in
producing the necessary coursework. At the same time, she invited them to make
sense of the text in terms of their experience, also taking the insights from their
work on character into understanding their own lives.
The different versions of the ‘one’ entity character are founded on and
produced in and by quite different pedagogic environments, different kinds of
teacher – student interaction and relations, different in content and in their modal
realization; different notions of ‘ability’; different conceptions of agency for
teachers and for students. All provide students with specific resources for
thinking, about character, thinking with character, and for thinking much more
widely. In Springton School character is produced as something to think about,
and to perform; it is bounded, technical, and has a limited potential beyond the
demands of the official curriculum. In Ravenscroft School character is produced
as something not only to think about, but to think with in the most general and
generative terms. There it is like a ‘fly-trap’ for every aspect of the play: character is a condensation, a distillation of the characteristics, attributes, themes,
issues and social and historical events, narrative themes, dramatic structure of
the text as a whole. It is a means of distilling ideas about the human condition.
Character is carried or realized in a social human being; but it is to be understood
as metaphorical. Character is a vessel in which the issues of the play are
collected. How character is conceived and constructed in different schools and
classroom contexts is, we believe, the result of differently conceived social relations in the school, of school populations, of teachers, students and their potentials for being agents.
Chapter 8
Orchestrating a debate
Orchestrating a debate
Introduction
We have, so far, described a range of conceptions of English, and focused
either on the means through which they are realized in the classroom, or shown
how they are actually produced. At this point we want to document in more
detail how English and the ‘lifeworlds’ of students can be and are brought
together in the classroom, by showing a route taken by Irene, the teacher
whose classroom at Ravenscroft School we have discussed several times
already. Her notion of English incorporates some of the ‘traditional’ conceptions of the task of school English, and at the same time she is focused quite
precisely on the demands of the official curriculum. As far as she is concerned,
English has to serve a real purpose for the students who experience it; she is
equally clear that English is a subject that can enrich the experience of the
students in her classroom.
The literary text is one vehicle for achieving both. Yet, as our multimodal analysis has shown so far, a focus on speech and writing alone misses much that is
crucial to the understanding of English. The question is whether this is so with
the literary text – that object par excellence which might still be thought to define
the subject English. So there are two questions we pose in this chapter. One is a
question about curricular purpose – ‘How does the teacher bring about the
connection of literary text and lifeworld of the students?’ – and the other is about
our methodology, our ‘way of looking’ – ‘Can the multimodal approach add to an
understanding of that curricular task?’ Hence we look for the ways in which this
teacher builds a fuller sense both of the literary text and of ‘the literate person’.
The pedagogic purpose, namely seeking and providing criteria and means on
which the successful assessment of an essay can be based, is constantly there,
forming the backdrop to the teacher’s actions: it is the recognition by the teacher
of the demands of the official curriculum.
We examine this complex set of aims in relation to one newer and now
common literacy practice in the school – the shared reading and interpretation of
a set text, leading in later lessons to the individual production of an assessed
essay.
Orchestrating a debate 117
The newer agenda: ‘literacy practices’
Increasing attention has been paid in recent years to the study of literacy practices in
informal situations as experienced among adults (Barton and Hamilton 1998;
Baynham 1995) and as experienced by young children in the home and community
(Gregory and Williams 2000; Kenner 2000; Kress 1995, 2003; Moss 2001; Pahl
1999). These informal literacy practices have been contrasted with the practices of
what has been called ‘schooled’ literacy (Street and Street 1995), ‘official’ literacy
(Dyson 1997) or ‘mainstream’ literacy (Heath 1983). We are aware that ‘things’ have
moved on since the data for our project was collected in 2001, specifically through the
introduction of the ‘Key Stage 3 policy’ into secondary schools in England. Nevertheless, little attention has yet been given to the study of literacy practices as experienced by pupils at Key Stages 3 and 4 in secondary-school English classrooms. Nor
has the role of secondary English teachers or the resources available to them as ‘mediators of literacy’ (Baynham 1995) to adolescent students been attended to as yet.
This neglect of literacy practices in the secondary-school English classroom
may have been due to a perception that by this stage of schooling teachers have
become so enmeshed in curriculum prescription that there is little to be observed as
creatively constructed in the classroom other than what might in any case, and
more easily, be gathered from an analysis of curriculum documentation. However,
as we have shown so far, even though they are regulated by policy, curriculum and
variously approved pedagogic frameworks, English teachers actively construct
their subject day by day, differently in the settings of the different classrooms.
They do so in the materials they use, the ideas they generate, the modes of communication they employ, and the relationships they form (Jones 2003b) as they work
with students. On the evidence of our study, we think it is safe to predict that even
the most exhaustively regulated educational policies are creatively mediated by
teachers; in this their work is shaped by the multitude of factors we have suggested,
not least among them their students’ responses (Pollard 2002).
So here, working with an example of that common literacy practice observed
across the project schools, the shared reading and interpretation of a set text, we
begin to examine this practice more closely. As we have said, it aims, in later
lessons, toward the production by individual students of an essay for assessment.
Our analysis makes it clear that some teachers, while focused on (official) curriculum and examination, have found strategies that give them space to connect texts
with the experiences of their students – one of our two primary focuses here. They
do so in ways that link English in all its aspects to wider social and ethical issues,
drawing on their own and their students’ life experiences in order to make connections with the texts studied.
Edwards and Mercer (1987) have argued that it is in the talk between teacher and
pupil that education is done or fails to be done – in the construction of ‘common
knowledge’. But in the process of transmitting academic knowledge and skills,
education regulates and positions not only talk but also bodies (Bernstein 1996).
Thus it is not enough to examine the use of verbal resources, as the work of
118 English in Urban Classrooms
Edwards and Mercer itself shows. That is one foundational reason why, in our
research, we turn a ‘multimodal’ lens on teaching higher-order literacy skills in the
English classroom. In our use of the term ‘higher-order literacy skills’ we refer to
the broader conceptual issues of understanding a text itself – the meanings of
literary texts, a full sense of the potential of curriculum entities such as character
and narrative – rather than a narrow, sparse sense of literacy as residing in the
competencies of using the resources of writing, of syntax and grammar alone. In
other words, we understand the teaching of literacy skills as based on a multimodal
production, in which speech and writing are just two modes among many in the
ensemble of modes involved in the production of English in a specific classroom.
The starting point for multimodal approaches is to extend the social interpretation of language and its meanings to the whole range of representational and
communicational modes employed in a culture. Multimodality assumes that all
modes have, like language, been shaped through their cultural, historical and social
uses to realize social functions. We, along with many others, take all
communicational acts to be socially made, and meaningful about the social environments in which they have been made. We assume that different modes shape the
meanings to be realized in mode-specific ways, so that meanings are differently
realized in different modes. In the example discussed here the resources of gesture
– for instance the spatial extent of a gesture, the intonational range of voice, the
direction and length of a gaze – are all part of the resources for making meaning.
The meanings of multimodal signs fashioned from such resources, like the meanings of speech, are located in the social origin, motivations and interests of those
who make the sign in specific social contexts. These all effect and shape the sign
that is made. In order to explore the uses of all modes, we turn to the social semiotic
notion of meaning functions, derived from the work of Michael Halliday (1985).
This allows us to analyse how the modal resources are used to realize both
ideational (somewhat too broadly: ‘what the utterance is about’) and interpersonal
(also too broadly: ‘how the relations between makers of signs and receivers of
signs are represented’) meanings as signs. As we have indicated at various points,
and particularly in Chapter 3, we think that our theory, our way of looking,
provides a range of tools with which to ‘prise open’ the meanings of the English
classroom more fully than a focus on the modes of language alone. We apply these
conceptual tools to examine the meanings of the signs and of what Scheflen (1973)
calls ‘customary acts’: acts that happen in a particular context at a particular time
and which have an established function.
In the remainder of this discussion we now focus on the ‘multimodal orchestration’ of a ‘whole-class’ debate around a text, as an example of our two concerns here.
The context of the classroom
The example discussed in this chapter is drawn from Ravenscroft School. The
social origins of signs are deeply implicated in the (multimodally realized) meanings created, and so it is important to note the teacher’s own social postioning.
Orchestrating a debate 119
Irene is a Black African-Caribbean woman, an ethnic background shared with a
significant number of her pupils. In interviews, she expressed a strong interest in
the impact of cultural difference on learning; she has a powerful commitment to
raising students’ academic attainment. Her aim, she says, is to provide students
with a framework within which they will be able both to succeed academically
and to read real life critically. Irene is able to create a particular relationship with
her Black students, such as those participating in the incident we shall describe
here, by sharing some of her own life experiences as a Black woman with her
class, at points where this has relevance. Conversely, the students told us in interviews that in English lessons ‘We voice our opinions … We are allowed to talk
and say what we feel’; ‘we feel we have got respect’.
The focus of this lesson is on drawing out and establishing, in debate, dialogue
and interaction, the construction of gender, both as it is in the text and in its meanings for the students in the class. This shared cultural, ethnic and social positioning, and the relationship of trust established by the teacher with the students
over time, we think underlies and makes possible the specificities of this particular
event.
Rhetorical orchestrations
In the lesson we focus on here, Irene is working at mediating a text to the students
as part of the Key Stage 4 National Curriculum requirements for ‘wider reading’.
The text she has chosen is a short story by William Trevor, Theresa’s Wedding. It
examines the relationships among an Irish Catholic family and their friends and
partners, as revealed at a wedding reception. The teacher’s curriculum objective is
to develop students’ skills in providing evidence from the text to justify their
interpretations of these characters, their feelings and motives.
At the start of the ‘critical incident’ that we have chosen to analyse here, the
teacher has changed her position in the classroom, and her posture has altered. She
has moved from a formal posture and position (seated in an upright posture at a
desk at the front-centre of the classroom) to an informal one (sitting on the edge of
a desk at the front-left side of the classroom). This marks and, we argue, makes
possible and produces a significant change in discourses adopted from then on by
both the teacher and the students. We try to show how the teacher rhetorically
‘orchestrates’ the students, drawing on them as a resource in the analysis of the text
that she wishes to construct jointly with them. We can see the teacher deploying
her knowledge of her students’ lives to construct a seemingly simple framework
that they can use in a successful interpretation of the text for the purposes of
meeting assessment requirements.
Simultaneously she uses the text to ask students to reflect on their own lives and
their social positioning. In this case, the students are asked to focus on gender relationships – on the construction that she offers: ‘And you boys will need to examine
sometimes how you behave towards girls, even in school as well. Yes?’
120 English in Urban Classrooms
Women
Figure 8.1
Men
(Representation of) the teacher’s diagram on the board
Creating a framework for text analysis
In the first stage of the sequence the teacher sets up a framework for the critical
analysis and debate of the text through her use of the resources of the photocopied
text of the story, through talk, gesture, drawing and writing on the board. She
employs the modes of gaze, gesture and posture to focus on the text, subduing her
own and the students’ bodily movement. She stands at the front of the classroom
and instructs the students to ‘find the page’ where the revelation that ‘Theresa has
slept with Screw Doyle’ is revealed. She then moves away from centre, moves a
little to the left, to perch informally on a table in the far-left corner of the classroom, expressing her own difficulty in making sense of the reaction of the male
character in the story as she is moving across. Her move away from the centre
opens the floor for debate to the students, while her request to ‘find the page’ positions the text as the ultimate authority in critical reading events. The teacher then
draws a diagram on the board (Figure 8.1).
Through her talk and gesturing in relation to the ‘diagram’, she produces an
analytical device, or frame, for the discussion of the text, in which gender is the
single category. Visually, the diagram polarizes ‘women’ and ‘men’, literally
dividing them as two elements. In the visual semiotics of Kress and van Leeuwen
(1996) it is assumed that where an element is placed in the framed space is a matter
of compositional choice, and its position is therefore meaningful. They suggest that
the direction of written scripts has shaped how people come to ‘read’ and ‘produce’
images, and that as a result particular meanings (information values) are associated
with the spatial position of an element. In societies where people read from left to
right the information value of given (‘what we know or take to be the case’) is associated with elements on the left, and the information value of new (‘what we assume to
be new information’) is associated with elements that are positioned on the right of
the space. In the diagram shown in Figure 8.1, the element ‘women’ would therefore
have the value of ‘given (and ‘known’) (the teacher is, after all, a woman), while
‘men’ is compositionally associated with the value of ‘new’ (and therefore ‘not
known’). The separation of ‘women’ and ‘men’ is emphasized by the teacher’s
repeated gesturing at the two sides of the diagram. These gestures are accompanied
by her comments that ‘this is the men now’ and ‘we’re looking at how men act’, in
Orchestrating a debate 121
the context of her discussion of the author’s placing of male and female characters in
different settings in the story. While talking about the story the teacher makes several
circling gestures around the diagram; these gestures link the diagram and its meanings into the debate that follows.
The story itself acts as a resource in that each student has the actual text of
Theresa’s Wedding. (We might draw comparisons here with the treatments of texts
in Springton and Wayford School that we discuss in other chapters, particularly
where students were given no direct access to texts or only to small extracts from
them.) These students are used to using a full text; they look through it, they find
and agree on the page at issue, and they read the passage. The teacher deals with
the text at the more abstract level of a ‘theme’, in this case that of gender relations.
The diagram and her gestures in relation to it have already linked the ‘text as
abstract theme’, ‘text as literal story’ and ‘text as material object’. The diagram
remains as a visual backdrop throughout the lesson, serving as an abstract schema
onto which the teacher can map (constantly varying) aspects of the text itself, the
classroom interaction and the analytical theme for the assignment.
In the second stage of the sequence, the teacher opens up the text (as object) to
begin to elicit the students’ own response. The text is read and then the teacher asks
‘All right. Would … what’s wrong with that? What makes you feel … what is wrong
with Screw Doyle telling Artie on his wedding day?’ The students begin to respond
and the teacher then starts to orchestrate the often very lively debate that ensues.
In the third stage of the sequence the teacher sets up a debate between the
students on the basis of their gender, calling first on the female students and then,
separately, on the male students. At this point the teacher’s talk changes. She
adopts a wider pitch-range, and a more emphatic rhythm, which we take to be
signifiers of heightened emotion (see van Leeuwen 1999). Her choice of vocabulary changes from the formal to a less formal: for example, ‘Ah. All right! Hold on
to that!’ and later ‘Ah, I like that, inequality. Who takes responsibility for this?’
The teacher’s gestures change from being infrequent, slow, small-scale hand
movements close to her body, to more frequent, more rapid, larger gestures,
directed away from her and at the students. This shift in voice quality, in vocabulary, and gesture points to an intensification of energy, and represents a shift across
all these modes from a register of a formal style to a register of one that is less
formal. We think that this intensification in the teacher’s communicational manner
is akin to the ‘customary acts’ (Scheflen 1973) of talk shows, such as those of
Oprah or Jerry Springer. In her interview the teacher commented that the students
watched these TV debates and that the parlance of the shows had begun to ‘enter’
the classroom as part of the students’ communicational repertoire. During this part
of the interaction quite similar changes appear in the students’ talk and gesture. For
the moment, the focus shifts away from written text to student experience. The
teacher is, literally, orchestrating the discussion through her gestures – ‘shushing’
and holding her hand up to stop boys from talking, waving the girls to respond. The
girls and the teacher together ‘fill in’ the women’s side of the diagram. Both
through her gesture and her talk the teacher constructs the diagram as an analytical
122 English in Urban Classrooms
framework for examining both the text and the social relations of the classroom.
The female side of the debate ends with the question ‘Who takes responsibility for
this?’ and with that question the debate is now opened up to the boys.
In the fourth stage of the sequence, the teacher opens the debate with the boys by
asking ‘How would you have felt? Put your hands up, as males in this room, if it
had been your wedding night, Christopher, and somebody had revealed that about
your bride?’ Here she draws on shared knowledge, as both she and the class know
that Christopher had recently been involved in a physical confrontation. Again the
pitch, tone and volume of her voice are higher and more variable than at other
points during the lesson. There is a noticeably less formal use of language by the
teacher and the students. The teacher gets up from her seat and paces across the
front of the room. Her earlier expansive gestures of ‘calling in’ the girls’ responses
are replaced with tight, small, pointing gestures: she points and wags her finger
‘challenging’ the boys to engage in the debate. Christopher smiles and hits his fist
into his hand and says, ‘You’d be feeling quite angry, init’. Peter volunteers ‘I’m
going to feel angry, coz I know if it was way before the marriage, yeah, I simply
wouldn’t have gone through with the wedding, because, that’s, that’s…’ Peter’s
and Christopher’s comments on their imagined anger and the gesture of ‘mock
violence’ serve to sketch in a content for the ‘men’ side of the diagram.
Through talk and gesture Irene has placed the male and the female students in a
different relationship to the text. The teacher does not ask the girls to place themselves in the position of Theresa, the main female protagonist; perhaps she
assumes that they will automatically do so. Rather, the focus is on ‘men’, and the
girls are asked to comment on ‘how men act’ and ‘why men feel free to talk about
their conquests’. By contrast the teacher asks the boys to respond directly (and
emotionally) to the situation described in the text, rather than to engage in a more
distanced analysis of the text itself.
The literary text as evidence
In the fifth stage of the sequence the teacher brings the text back to adjudicate in the
debate, by asking a female student to read out a relevant passage. The girl reads the
part of the story where the bridegroom’s friend, Screw Doyle, reveals that he had
slept with the bride some years before, arousing the anger of the bridegroom
towards the bride, rather than towards Screw Doyle himself. The teacher’s use of
the text here achieves two things simultaneously. Firstly, it negates the male
response of Christopher and Peter. They, like Artie the male character in the story,
have ‘not listened to the facts’. Secondly, it reminds the class of the curriculum
objective, the need to ground their personal responses in the evidence of the text.
The first battle won, the teacher returns to her position on the left of the class
beside her diagram on the blackboard, smiling, her posture relaxed and her voice
calm (low volume, even pitch and tone, and regular rhythm), and again now using
formal vocabulary. The transcript below shows both the modes used by the teacher
and her drawing on the characters in the text, to link the responses of the students in
Orchestrating a debate 123
the classroom with the wider issue of gender. (We have used the transcriptional
convention of (McNeill 1985), in which the underline shows the temporal placement and extent of the gesture in relation to the speech.) Throughout this episode
the teacher sits on a desk to the left of the board at the front of the classroom.
So you see how men then draw a – a kind of – you know
At Lizzy
GESTURE: Right hand in air – pointing brings hands together, palms flat fingers
touching [to form a line]
POSTURE: Sitting on edge of desk, one leg on floor, back upright – angled
towards Peter
(2) SPEECH: There’s a line between male and female
GAZE: At Peter
GESTURE: Moves right hand few inches in front of left, palms flat, moves hands
away from one another and back again
POSTURE: Sitting on edge of desk, one leg on floor, back upright – angled
towards Peter
(3) SPEECH: It seems, because the men,
GAZE: At diagram on board
GESTURE: Holds right hand – palm flat in front of her, moves, stretches out left
arm, places hand on board and touches the ‘men’ side of the diagram – holds
it there
POSTURE: Sitting on edge of desk, one leg on floor, back less upright – body
angled toward Peter
(4) SPEECH: You know, because the men –
GAZE: At diagram on board
GESTURE: Left arm stretched out, palm flat against ‘men’, taps ‘men’
POSTURE: Sitting on edge of desk, one leg on floor, back less upright, body
angled toward Peter
(5) SPEECH: Some men … might possibly would have become violent towards
Screw Doyle
GAZE: Around classroom to places occupied by male students then directly at
Christopher
GESTURE: Drops and sweeps right hand/arm away from body out toward the
classroom; takes left hand from ‘men’ on board and keeping it stretched
sweeps it out around the classroom; moves left arm back again to touch the
‘men’ side of the diagram
POSTURE: Bends forward – leans in toward the class
(1) SPEECH:
GAZE:
Through her gesture the teacher transforms the diagram on the blackboard into
an analytical grid for use on the text. Augmenting the ‘line’ acting as a division
between ‘women’ and ‘men’ on the blackboard, the teacher gestures with her hand
to create a barrier in front of her body between herself and Peter. As she does this
she says: ‘there’s a line between male and female it seems….’ This gesture serves
124 English in Urban Classrooms
to realize the ‘line’ between men and women as a physical, material one. She
gestures back at the line of the diagram, and by so doing she links the line on the
board with the physical barrier she has created between herself and Peter: she
embodies the separation of men and women. In this way the teacher places herself
and Peter on either side of the line of the diagram, and of the structure of the text
more generally. Momentarily she has re-framed the power structure of ‘teacher
and student’ into one of ‘female and male’.
Sitting on the table, she gestures at ‘men’ written on the board, and as if lifting
this generalized term from the board, she sweeps her arm around the room as she
says ‘you know, because the men … Some men might possibly become violent
towards Screw Doyle’. She gazes directly at Christopher, who had earlier in the
discussion made a punching gesture in response to how he might feel in the character’s position, and other male students. Here, we think, the teacher is drawing the
social positions and the responses of the male students into her quite abstract
discussion of the thematic of the text, as it is realized in the diagram. Her gesture
and her gaze make comments at the same time both on the men in the text and the
young men in the classroom. However, the comments on the men before her and
the men in the text happen in different modes: the teacher’s comment on the young
men in the classroom is made through her gaze and gesture, while her comment on
the men in the text is made in her talk. We might say that in a traditional analysis it
would be said that comments in gaze and gesture might be felt as implicit, and that
comment in talk as explicit. In a multimodal analysis, we might say that comments
made via talk are immediately available for overt debate, for rejection or negation
(as of course for acceptance also); and that comments made via gaze and talk are
not. If that is the case, then the teacher has made her points more potently, for the
students cannot directly challenge, contradict or reject them.
Throughout the lesson the teacher uses gaze to nominate, and she uses gesture to
restrain the students for the rhetorical purpose of the lesson. For instance the
teacher used gaze to nominate female students to talk and to associate Christopher
visually with her comment on some men’s potential violence. Earlier in the
episode, she had used gesture in order to orchestrate a debate along gender lines
(holding her hand up in a ‘stop sign’) to subdue male students from talking.
Through her gesture and gaze the teacher defuses aspects of this highly charged
debate, as she did not have to say ‘I don’t want to hear from the boys right now’,
she was able to stop them as ‘individuals’ without referring to gender. She was also
able to carefully select which boys contributed to the debate. Theoretically and
methodologically we might comment that she uses mode in a highly apt manner in
relation to her purposes; ideologically of course this opens a different potential
debate, one about the (seeming) covertness of her rhetorical strategy.
Although the teacher herself has ‘drawn the line between the sexes’, and
gestured it into existence in the classroom, she attributes the production of the
separation of ‘men’ and ‘women’ to men. Of course, she could have attributed the
line to herself as an analytical device for looking at the theme of gender in a text; or
to William Trevor, the author of the text, as a literary device; or to the position of
Orchestrating a debate 125
the girls and herself as women. However, she attributes it to the attitudes (and
potential actions) of men in general, to the male students in the classroom and to
the response of Peter and Christopher in particular. In doing this she links the text
with men as a group and with the male students in the class in a particular way.
Through her gesture, talk, and use of the diagram-image, the teacher and the
students whom she has selectively nominated to contribute to the debate collaborate in producing the text as a reflection of social reality.
Without the diagram the teacher would have had to talk the abstract notion of
gender into existence and to link the behaviour of the male students directly to the
characters in the story and to men in general. To say such things would both take
time and, as we have said, be highly contentious. The diagram enabled the teacher
to establish the divide as a ‘fact’, and to do so quickly and without debate. Her
gesture with the diagram enabled her to make a visual link between the characters
in the story, the students, and ‘men’ in general. This enabled the teacher to elide the
move from literary fiction to the lived lives of the young men in the classroom. It
also enabled her to treat them as a homogeneous group in the category of ‘men’:
whether the young Black men in the classroom or the young Irish men in the story.
It enabled her to introduce the concept of gender, to isolate it descriptively and to
simplify it as an analytical tool.
Talk show
Throughout this concluding sequence of the episode the students are at their desks
and the teacher is seated on a desk, at the front-left of the classroom. The teacher
stands up and asks ‘So, why wasn’t he angry with his friend?’ As she does so her
gestures emphasize her question and her negative evaluation of Artie’s behaviour.
As the students all begin to respond simultaneously, Peter says ‘Because’ and puts
his hand up. The teacher does not respond immediately, but then does look
directly at him and nominates him: ‘Peter’. He now has the floor, and ‘takes off’.
Lizzy and Christopher, the teacher and Darcus join in.
Peter
What I was going to say is
Smiles, looks directly teacher
GESTURE: Holds left hand high in air finger pointed
POSTURE: Leans back in chair, body angled toward teacher
(2) SPEECH: He ... probably could, true, it is different between men and women.
GAZE: At teacher
GESTURE: Holds left arm high, wags finger up and down at teacher/moves arm
to point at Lizzy, then back to teacher, wags finger
POSTURE: Leans further back in seat
(3) SPEECH: But also, a friend – yeah, he’s been his friend for years. Her, he
didn’t even love her too much.
(1) SPEECH:
GAZE:
126 English in Urban Classrooms
At teacher
Holds left arm high, hand pointed, wags finger up and down
POSTURE: Leans back in chair
(4) SPEECH: It’s not a, it’s not a proper relationship.
GAZE: At teacher
GESTURE: Lowers arm, brings both elbows to side body, opens arms apart,
palms open
POSTURE: Sits forward, shaking head from left to right
GAZE:
GESTURE:
Lizzy
It’s his pride, it’s his pride. He’s damaged his pride.
Looks at Peter, then at teacher
GESTURE: Hands clasped on lap
POSTURE: Leaning right arm on desk, facing teacher (back to Peter)
(6) SPEECH: ’Cos it’s a male thing, ’cos he doesn’t really care.
GAZE: At teacher
GESTURE: Holds hands apart, fingers spread moves to and way from her body
POSTURE: Facing teacher (back to Peter)
(7) SPEECH: What, if he doesn’t love her it doesn’t really matter too much!
GAZE: Turns to look at Christopher
GESTURE: Stretches left arm, palm open, sweeps out directed at Christopher,
then drops arm and hand to rest on her lap
POSTURE: Leans back onto desk – moving away from Christopher
(5) SPEECH:
GAZE:
Christopher
He probably thought if she’s having my baby I gotta marry her –
religious as well. That’s why he married her –
GAZE: At Philip, then at teacher
GESTURE: Rubbing hands together on desk and moves hands apart, moves left
hand in front of and away from right hand, then clasps them
POSTURE: Leans to right (towards Philip)
(9) SPEECH: finds out she been having sex with the best man – mixed emotions
GAZE: At Philip – then at teacher
GESTURE: Holds hands open and apart, swings both hands towards Peter, holds
hands to side of head, makes soft circular motions
POSTURE: Leans back slightly in seat faces front
(8) SPEECH:
Teacher
So men can behave in a certain way? That is acceptable. But a
woman can’t? He was cross with Theresa. Didn’t even want to sit next to her,
on the bus. Do you remember?
(10) SPEECH:
Orchestrating a debate 127
At Peter and Christopher
Makes slow circular movement on knee with left hand
POSTURE: Leaning back on right arm stretched to side, legs crossed, head up
back slightly, and tilted to the left (in direction of Peter)
GAZE:
GESTURE:
Darcus (off camera)
(11) SPEECH:
No – where does it say that?
Teacher
Look at your story.
At Darcus
GESTURE: Holds up left hand, points slowly moves arm up and down
POSTURE: (as before)
[Students look for place in story]
(13) SPEECH: Didn’t affect his relationship, friendship, with Screw Doyle.
GAZE: Looks at Peter
GESTURE: Waves left hand right and left in front of face, fingers spread
POSTURE: Turns to face Peter
(14) SPEECH: That’s a men thing. And you boys will need to examine sometimes
how you behave towards girls, even in school as well. Yes?
GAZE: Turns to look at Christopher then around the room
GESTURE: Nods head, holds up left arm with opens fingers, cups hand and flicks
open fingers, drops hand to knee. Nods head.
POSTURE: Leaning back on right arm stretched to side, legs crossed, head up
and back slightly, hand on knee
(12) SPEECH:
GAZE:
Peter’s jabbing, pointing gesture, his laid-back posture, the increased volume of
his voice, his varying pitch and rhythm as well as his use of ‘colloquial language’
combine to shift the style of interaction back to the genre of the talk-show debate.
Peter wags his finger at the teacher, in an echo of the teacher’s earlier gesture that
had negatively evaluated the response of the male character Artie (and Peter). He
gazes directly at the teacher as he gestures, and his body is turned toward her. His
gaze and gesture direct his words at the teacher (and at one moment at Lizzy). He
acknowledges the teacher’s (and Lizzy’s) earlier point (that men and women might
be different) but directly challenges her interpretation of events. He offers an alternative view of male behaviour (Artie’s behaviour): it is not that men don’t listen,
but that long-term friendship is more valuable than immediate and potentially false
‘love’. This can be read in different ways, perhaps that men are more reliable than
women or that you can depend on long-term friendships more than on sexual partnerships (the latter of which may be true for many young people).
The teacher does not comment, leaving the floor now to the students. Lizzy
responds initially; she looks at the teacher, echoing the teacher’s usually more
128 English in Urban Classrooms
restrained body posture, open gestures, calm voice to suggest authoritatively that it
is Artie’s ‘male pride’ that causes him to be angry with Theresa instead of with his
friend. Peter’s response is to change his body posture: he turns away from the
teacher and Lizzy, his gestures change to a wide open surrendering movement, as
if giving up. He puts his hand to his mouth and turns to face and talk to Christopher.
Through body posture, gesture and position, Peter physically ‘withdraws’ from the
debate.
Lizzy then shifts her body posture and position in order to address her own
comments also to Christopher. Her voice quality changes, her voice becomes
louder, more high pitched – both indicators of greater energy/intensity and therefore of heightened emotion; her gestures are bigger as she leans back and points
into the air towards Christopher: ‘What if he doesn’t love her, it doesn’t really
matter too much!’ Lizzy, through her talk, posture, gesture, gaze, and her talk of
love, continues the ‘talk show’ genre. Through their posture, gesture and gaze
Lizzy and Peter make Christopher the focus of the debate: he is the person whom
both are trying to convince of their argument. However, Christopher does not side
with either Lizzy or Peter, although he does try to appease Peter through leaning
toward him, looking at him and gesturing at him. But Christopher also looks at the
teacher, his clasped hands echoing the earlier gesture of the teacher. He shifts the
discussion back to the text: ‘He [Artie] probably thought if she’s having my baby I
gotta marry her – religious as well.’
Although Christopher introduces the issue of religion, the teacher chooses not to
pick up on this alternative reading. Indeed, when she speaks, she does not
comment on what Peter, Lizzy or Christopher has said. Following Christopher’s
lead, she returns to the text to show how men and women seem to be expected to
behave differently: ‘Didn’t even want to sit next to her, on the bus. Do you
remember?’ In this way she uses the text as evidence of the wrongness of Artie’s
(and Peter’s) ‘male’ response. The students start to look for this line in text. As they
are examining the text for the evidence of Artie’s behaviour toward Theresa, the
teacher says ‘And you boys will need to examine sometimes how you behave
towards girls, even in school as well. Yes?’ As she says this she looks first at Christopher, and then around the classroom. Through her talk and gaze she directly links
the examination of the text with the examination of self.
The boys’ comments offer an alternative reading of Artie’s behaviour – as a
matter of friendship, time, trust and religion, rather than of gender. However, these
‘alternative’ readings unsettle the analytic frame of ‘marriage and gender equality’
that the teacher is working to establish for the students to use in making their
assessed written response to the text. Hence the teacher’s refusal to acknowledge
alternative views is not simply a response to gender relations in the school and
society more generally, not just the insertion of a piece of social and ethical
instruction into the English lesson, a distraction from curriculum objectives. On
the contrary, the issues raised, the debate itself, are directly linked to the teacher’s
objective, to provide an analytical device and frame that the students can then
deploy in order to receive good grades in their next essay. Gender provides the
Orchestrating a debate 129
possibility of constructing that frame, with the relationships between the distant
Irish wedding guests played out in their own classmates’ bodies and emotions.
Now the students can produce a ‘personal response’ to the text, as required by the
National Curriculum.
Conclusion
A link between text and self, the ‘personal response’, is a rhetorical stance explicitly demanded in the National Curriculum, and still lodged in the traditions of
English. As we said in Chapter 6, the transmission of moral values has been an
essential part of the ideological project of English Literature. This position, it was
hoped, would offer the potential for students to discover the self through reading
‘[to] know how they came to be as they, very idiosyncratically, are’ (Kermode
1979: 15). The residue of this legacy persists in the official English curriculum’s
focus on the development of citizens with a sense of moral and spiritual values. It
also persists in the now unofficial curricula of a nearly past tradition.
Our detailed exemplification shows two aspects of the curriculum that might
seem distinct; how the official curriculum – how literacy and ‘being literate’ are to
be taught and learnt in social interaction in the secondary school – is to be linked
with the social construction of the ‘personal response’, which is also required in
that curriculum, demonstrably so for assessment purposes. In our example, the
literary text is used very deliberately to construct particular understandings of
social identity. These were then reflected back onto the text in order to construct a
workable framework for its critical analysis, a framework that could then be
deployed by the students in successfully accomplishing the forthcoming literacy
demand, the ‘assessed essay’ of a comparison of two texts on the theme of
marriage and gender.
We see all these aspects of the curriculum, whether ‘personal response’ or
literate activity, as the result always of multimodal ‘orchestration’ rather than
purely spoken dialogue or written performance. We are clear that in the process of
teaching and learning English, whatever the skills, teachers and students are
required to choose from, to engage with and in the process transform, the representational and communicational affordances (Kress and Bearne 2001) of all the
modes available to them in the classroom. The teacher in the classroom here is
involved in the choice and designed orchestration of a range of modes to actualize
her specific purposes. Even when speech is foregrounded as often in this lesson,
the teacher also uses image, gesture and body posture, both her own and that of her
students, to construct meaning. In fact our example shows that the uses of gaze,
gesture and image are crucial for her accomplishment of her rhetorical task. On the
one hand, to look only at language overlooks and denies the meanings carried in
other modes and the complex interplay between modes; on the other it actually
mis-describes the accomplishment of the production of English in the classroom.
Many of the the essential meanings and connections made in this lesson were
carried in modes other than language; and no matter the degree of trust established
130 English in Urban Classrooms
between teacher and students, they would have been too contentious to verbalize.
By expressing these meanings within the realm of the ‘unspoken’, through gesture,
gaze and the image of the diagram, the teacher brought the issue of gender clearly
into the debate while keeping the discussion relatively uncontentious, focused and
concrete. Here a multimodal analysis has enabled us to examine the ways in which
‘that which cannot be easily spoken’ is realized in the English classroom. The
unspoken meanings are as potent as those that are spoken.
Acknowledgement
A version of this chapter appeared as a paper by J. Bourne and C. Jewitt, ‘Orchestrating debate: a multimodal analysis of classroom interaction’ appeared in
Reading: Literacy and Language 3(2), and we are grateful to Blackwell
Publishing for copyright permission to use it here.
Chapter 9
Only write down what you
need to know
Annotation for what?
Annotation for what?
Introduction
The annotation of texts of all kinds is a key practice in English. An annotated text
can be seen as a direct pedagogic link between the actualization of English in the
classroom and its official (re)production via an examination. We analyse two
examples of annotation in two classrooms in two schools in order to describe how
the teachers’ deployment of annotation constitutes what the text comes to be,
through notions of ‘textual meaning’ developed largely implicitly in that practice.
That meaning in its turn positions students (and teachers) to English as a subject.
Both examples are from lessons focused on ‘wider reading’, at the end of which
students write a comparative essay on two short stories. In both our examples
issues of student agency and curricular control are explored, and the link between
annotation and examination is made apparent. In this way ‘annotation of texts’
becomes another lens through which we view the central question of this book
‘How does English come to be as it is in a specific classroom?’
Through our analysis of the two lessons, one drawn from Wayford School and
the other from Ravenscroft School, we offer a description of what it is that the
teachers and students are engaged in when annotating a text. This description
enables us to pose yet again the question what the teachers are hoping for and
attempting to achieve, and what view of literary study they are attempting to
construct.
Annotation is a device that teachers use to shape their students’ responses to a text.
In as far as it also elicits their responses, it is a means to bring students’ ‘private
thoughts into public words’ (Hackman 1987: 12) leaving ‘a trace on the page of the
sense you have been making of the text’ (Northedge 1990: 41). In this way annotation is a means for reflection, in which a reader responds to what they find significant
and meaningful. The marks that students make on the copy of the text as they work
around and with it can be seen as signalling a sense of the text as an object (Hackman
1987). Annotation, and more general note taking, is seen as one way of making
reading an active process and focusing the readers’ attention on the text.
132 English in Urban Classrooms
Annotation as it appears in the classroom is embedded in historical practices of
textual analysis that go beyond school English:
If you ask annotators today what systems they use for marking their books and
where they learned them, they generally tell you that their methods are private
and idiosyncratic. As to having learned them, they have no more recollection
of having been taught the arts of annotation than of how to fasten a wristwatch.
If you listen to their accounts of what they do, or if you are allowed to examine
their books, however, you find (with very, very few exceptions) that they
reproduce the common practices of readers since the Middle Ages. These are
traditional practices culturally transmitted by the usual tacit and mysterious
means – example, prohibition, word of mouth.
(Jackson 2001: 5)
We will discuss the tacit character of annotation later in the chapter. In our first
example, what annotation means is relatively unregulated and implicit: the teacher
rarely instructs the students in ‘how’ or ‘what’ to annotate. For her, annotation
serves as a more general device for developing ‘reading’, seen as a major tool for
learning; she sees the need to read critically and to gather information as requiring
the students to be able to excise judgement on a text, to modify, reject or develop
views of the text (Lunzer and Gardner 1979). By contrast, in our second example
the teacher makes the actual signs and devices of annotation explicit. As we have
said, both teachers directly link the work of annotation to examination.
The English GCSE examination procedures (AQA 2002) offer a very specific
definition and regulation of annotation. The NEAB anthology can be taken into the
examination room and may be annotated; and the AQA stipulates what is included
and excluded from the term annotation for the purposes of examination:
Annotation means brief handwritten marginal notes, underlinings,
hightlightings and vertical lines in the margin but not continuous prose. Additional notes, ‘post-it’ notes or loose inter-leaved sheets of paper and prepared
answers are not permitted.
(AQA 2002: XX)
Dymoke (2002) comments on the limiting effect the NEAB poetry anthology
has had on the study of texts, as students learn to concentrate and focus on annotation rather than on creative engagement, as they are anxious to cover all potential
examination questions. She argues that a focus on annotation and examination
‘produces kids who can produce responses rather than kids who can write poems’
(Dymoke 2002: 88). Our data similarly shows that teachers and students can
become both fixed on and successful at attending to the tasks of examination rather
than on the meaning of the literary texts. Of course this raises serious questions
about what English is in this area. Protherough (1986: 39) warns with some alarm
that a line-by-line exegesis of a text can ‘degenerate into an alternative text’. While
Annotation for what? 133
we would not echo this way of posing the problem – annotation of any sort necessarily produces a new text – we share the sense that practices of annotation can
work to close down certain possibilities of interpretation and response. Annotation
is one practice – maybe the practice, where the pressure of exams is most clearly
apparent. There is much general evidence of the incredible pressure of examination on teachers, students and schools, with the impact of ‘failure’ on each of these
being so high (Elsheikh and Leney 2002). This pressure can lead to the teacher
handing over – and students accepting – ready-made readings of a text. Such prepackaged interpretations by-pass the need for students to develop their own skills
in (critical) reading and the time required for repeated readings. In this scenario,
played out in example two here, the response of individual students becomes
redundant: response to the text is no longer the issue; rather the point now has
become ‘getting it right’.
Annotation in the English classroom
Our first example focuses on a series of lessons on William Trevor’s short story
Theresa’s Wedding taught by Irene in Ravenscroft School (see also Chapter 8).
The teacher works with the students, focusing on the theme of marriage and
gender. The second example draws on data from John’s classroom in Wayford
School, in which he works with two short stories: Superman and Paula Brown’s
New Snowsuit (Plath) and Kiss Miss Carol (Dhondy). Here the theme established
by the teacher is ‘the loss of innocence’.
Annotation in Irene’s classroom, Ravenscroft School
This teacher has two aims when dealing with annotation. The process of annotation was clearly linked to preparing the students for examination, as the excerpt
from her interview below demonstrates. However, for her it is also a device to
support the students in developing an understanding of a text and to give them the
ability to relate the literary text to their own life experiences. As Irene commented
during her interview:
Every time you teach something you feel that it is where the child is going that
you will have to be taken, so you are teaching annotation. Finally [it] is the
exam. How will that child make sense of it? Will the child just start answering
the question or will the child be reflective, go through the steps? There is a key
word here and reading through and making notes. Because they will come out
with a better exam result. We try hard to get them a bit of exam technique and
there are all these things we have to consider and annotation is important
because when the child first encounters a passage and then decides to structure
a response – they have read all the questions yet sometimes they are not
reading at the heart of the text – they are missing those critical points and so
annotating is bringing a wealth of experience … This is analysis; before that it
134 English in Urban Classrooms
is retelling so annotation empowers them to be more analytical and see
beyond. It is always beyond. What we want is for them to make what they are
reading match to real life – do you know what I mean? There is a story that is
purely for enjoyment: what are the author’s intentions? And in annotating they
realize the writer is possibly saying a or b and whether they are wrong or right,
if they can give evidence, then you have to say ‘well, that is their perception’
and they can back that up.
For Irene, annotation is a part of the process of reading as deep engagement with a
text. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, her focus is on the meaning of the text, and annotation as technical process in the terms set out by the exam board is less prominent. On
several occasions she tells the students what to write, but she does not tell them ‘what
to think’. By contrast, in our second example, from Wayford School – discussed later –
it is the process of annotation that is foregrounded: the places where marks should be
made, and how they are to be written and symbolized, are all made explicit.
Throughout Irene’s lesson the teacher and the students sit at their desks; the
story as text is in front of them, their pencils in hand or on the desk. Their attention
is on the printed text; it is held, and gazed at; students run their fingers and pencils
across its pages, underline sections and write on it. They constantly return to it; it
begins and ends every exchange. Sitting at her desk, holding the text, the teacher
starts the lesson by clearly framing the purpose of re-reading and annotating:
We’ve read the story and now we’re looking at the issues arising in the story.
So you need a pencil to annotate. Remember what I said – when it is comparative writing you need to be aware of the various issues that arise so that you
can group similarities and differences in order to write a valid response.
Throughout the lesson the teacher works to establish that ‘the story’ is a general
comment on marriage, rather than on this specific wedding. The lesson is structured, at this point, as a series of rhythmic, cyclical movements across sections of
the text, as discussions between teacher and students, and as acts of annotation.
The teacher does not offer the students a specific reading: she does not interpret the
text for them. Rather, she offers a conceptual lens – namely ‘marriage’ – through
which to read the story, and she offers them analytical tools such as symbolic inference and close textual reading and invites their responses. She instructs them on
what kind of ‘reading’ they should engage in: ‘You need to scan now, when you’ve
read something already and you’re looking for information, you scan, you’re scanning now, just going through quickly, looking for where things are…’
In return the students offer their opinions on the text, on the motivation of characters, and on marriage. They discuss the characters’ feelings, the respectability
that the characters attribute to marriage, the assumptions that ‘people’ in general
make about marriage and happiness, and so on. The teacher weaves the students’
responses back to the text, reminding them of the need to ground their response ‘in’
the text. The students are involved in the work of interpretation, discussion,
Annotation for what? 135
annotation, and finding textual evidence. The following excerpt in which the
teacher focuses on the character of Agnes, sister of the bride Theresa, is typical:
How does she [Agnes] feel about the marriage?
She doesn’t approve.
TEACHER: Find the line that confirms…
Students, heads down, reading or scanning texts.
LINDA: ‘It sickens you a marriage like that.’
TEACHER: OK, so ‘sickens you’ – underline, ‘a marriage like that’.
Students underline their texts with pencil.
TEACHER: Loaded statements. Does she like Artie?
STUDENTS: No.
TEACHER: How does she feel about this place?
MELINDA: She don’t like it.
LINDA: She left, didn’t she? Left it.
TEACHER: But how does she refer to it? ‘She’ll be stuck in this…?’
STUDENTS: Dump!
TEACHER: Tells you about her feelings, so you’re looking for feelings as well,
what the writer feels.
LIZZY: She wants, does she want her sister to break out of, she wants her to
marry a more successful person so that maybe they can have more choice in
their future and they can move out if they want to.
TEACHER: OK.
KERRY: Like I don’t think she’s happy.
TEACHER: You don’t think who’s happy?
KERRY: Agnes, even though she’s married.
TEACHER: Yes, and we are told somewhere – where are we told that [students
start looking at story] Agnes isn’t happy? Although she is in a marriage that
appears to be successful we’ve learned somewhere in the story that she’s not
happy.
LINDA: I just think she feels stable, in some way stable.
TEACHER: OK find it. You can’t… [taps on the copy of story on her desk] it has
to be here. You must find textual evidence to justify your point. So where in
the story could you say this is implied if not stated explicitly? OK scan now,
do not read in detail, just scan please.
PAULA: Page 57, paragraph 4.
TEACHER: Read please.
PAULA: She says [reads the story] ‘She’d met George Tobin at a dance in Cork
and had said to Loretta that in six months’ time she’d be gone from the town
for ever. Which was precisely what had happened, except that marriage had
made her less nice than she’d been. She’d hated the town in a jolly way once,
laughing over it. Now she hardly laughed at all.’
LINDA: It’s a purpose I suppose, it was a convenient way to get married rather
than for love, it was more a convenience to escape I suppose.
TEACHER:
LINDA:
136 English in Urban Classrooms
Yes, you see you learn that now that she is married she is not a nice
person any more … page 55.
Students all turn to page 55.
MELISA: She’s turned sour, hasn’t she?
TEACHER:
From this more general discussion, the teacher returns to the text and the question of annotation and says ‘Annotate that please, put your square bracket, the
reader learns that Agnes got married to get away from the place that she hates’. The
text is a constant presence, and the cyclical rhythm of the lesson serves to foreground the interpretative and discursive work of the students alongside the teacher;
the teacher – while certainly taking a leading role – does not deliver ready-made
interpretations of the story. This ‘collective’ way of working is reflected and
embodied in the shared resources of the teacher and students – the story itself, as a
material text, and a pencil. During this part of the lesson, the teacher did not use the
board, nor did she did offer the students dictionaries, and she worked with her own
copy of the text, a fact whose significance becomes clear when we compare
Ravenscroft with Wayford. Both the teacher and the students sat at their desks
throughout the lesson; they had adopted the same basic body posture and gaze,
leaning on the table looking down at the story, and in their discussion they adopted
broadly the same tone of voice.
Annotation in John’s classroom, Wayford School
Our second example is a lesson from a series of lessons in which the teacher, John,
is working with two short stories – Sylvia Plath’s Superman and Paula Brown’s
New Snowsuit and Farrukh Dhondy’s Kiss Miss Carol. The teacher is working
with the students and the Superman text, using a mixture of whole-class and
small-group work.
If ‘shared practice and resources’ characterized the last example, here annotation is used to establish an authoritative set of relationships between the teacher,
the students and the text. As before, examination provides the background.
The first quarter of the lesson is used to give explicit instructions on how to annotate and how to draw evidence from the story. During this time the students are
seated at their tables in small groups, each with an anthology opened at the story, and
pens or pencils in hand or on their desks. No student speaks, and the teacher only
demands a raised a hand as a ‘yes’ in response to his questions. The teacher stands at
the front of the classroom; unlike Irene, he does not have a copy of the text. He writes
on the board, and he talks. These differences in posture, position, and in his relation
to the text signal him as ‘expert’ in relation to the text and its meaning. We might say
that these features are signs that ‘the text is in him’, that he is ‘above the text’. He
outlines the module, indicates the homework, comments on the use of quotations,
gives instructions regarding examination, talks about ‘evidence’, describes how to
annotate, and gives instructions on how to address specific questions, for example on
setting and on character, which he has written on the blackboard. The teacher’s focus
Annotation for what? 137
is on evidence, annotation and examination, but it is unclear what the content is that
is to be evidenced, annotated and examined. The focus is on ‘rules of technique’.
Students are urged to: ‘find the evidence’, look for clues, ‘make sure that your notes
are sufficient that if I asked you to talk to the next lesson you can’, and ‘don’t write
down what you don’t need’.
John starts the lesson by instructing the students to look for connections between
the two stories:
You’re going to go through the story and with a pencil you are going to be
looking for things. You’re looking for how the story is told, you’re looking for
quotations you can use in your exam. Now the exam question is going to be a
general question comparing two stories and the two stories are Superman and
Kiss Miss Carol. As you’re going through Superman you’re automatically
looking at how does it fit together, how does it connect with Kiss Miss Carol?
The tasks set out for the students – ‘look for quotations’, look at ‘how things fit
together’ or ‘connect’ – tend to be inexplicit and rather difficult. It is unclear what
criteria the students might use to select a quote or decide what might be a valid
connection. But the task of quote selection is foregrounded by the teacher and held
up as a kind of organizational structure for responding to the stories: ‘That’s the
most important thing you should have done, find the quotations first. You don’t
work out what you’re going to say and then find the quotes. You find the quotes
first because the quotes are actually where your answers come from.’
Thus John suggests that selection of quotation precedes analysis – that students
have to know what they’re looking for before they have made any organized sense of
the text. This, he conveys, is what the examination demands: ‘May I remind you that
over here [points at poster of curriculum assessment criteria on wall – described in
Chapter 4] is the assessment criteria. Yeah?’ And to meet these requirements
students must produce copious annotation: ‘I want you to find lots of cfs, yeah I want
you to have [writes on board “cf: KMC”] yep? And if you’re really smart you’ll
have a number there [points below the “cf: KMC”] which is the line. Yeh? So you
might have cf: KMC 204 okay? So you need a pencil and whizz through the story.’
There are difficulties here. Students are encouraged to learn a technique that
seems not to depend upon prior analysis, nor on the kind of exploration of textual
meaning that conversation might enable. They are urged to do so in the name of
GCSE assessment criteria that seem accessible enough, yet detached from textual
exploration will remain entirely inscrutable. The new explicitness seems in this
respect to be as opaque as older, much-criticized implicit pedagogies, in which
students were meant to imbibe method as invisibly as they absorbed the capacity to
make judgements about literary value. And the movement between the reading of
the text and the writing of an answer is left underexplained.
During the next twenty minutes of the lesson the teacher organizes the students into
groups of four to discuss the text. This accounts for half the lesson time. The discussion
is framed by a series of questions that the teacher has written on the board:
138 English in Urban Classrooms
1 Who tells the story – how do you know?
2 What happens in the first paragraph? How is this a beginning? What clues
to what will happen – foreshadowed?
3 What is the setting – place, time – evidence?
4 Paragraph 2 look at the description – what is described? Why is it
described? Use of colours?
The students sit, pencils or pens in hand, they work a bit, then talk about music,
football, television, downloading music; they flick through the story-text, rolling
pencils across desks; they read the questions on the board. There are uncertain
gazes, much pencil fiddling and looking at the text; there is little or no talk. John
moves around the groups and intervenes, writing in pen on the students’ texts.
The students’ lack of conversational focus and involvement in their written
suggest that they know, perhaps, that they can rely on the teacher to supply the
interpretation that they are not inclined or enabled to produce. Certainly, when the
lesson turns towards interpreting the text, and towards the opportunity for students
to feed back their own ideas, there is more evidence of the teacher’s interpretive
involvement than that of learners:
Francis, can you tell me some information please, that your group
have got from the first paragraph?
FRANCIS: She talks about the past.
TEACHER: Yeah, how long ago in the past?
FRANCIS: 1942.
TEACHER: How old was she in the story?
FRANCIS: Fifth grade.
TEACHER: Yeah, but how old was she? Information you can possibly deduce,
how old she is.
STUDENTS: 10 or 11.
TEACHER: What war is it? World War Two; I know this because I know the
story is American; America got involved in 1942. How many people had
that?
Some students put hands up, teacher counts them.
TEACHER: How old was Sylvia Plath when she wrote the story?
TEACHER:
What is expected in this instance is information not interpretation, and what
seems to be developing is a curriculum of facticity, what the students can pull out
from the text in the most direct way, rather than what they might ‘make of’ the text
through an act of interpretation.. The students’ contribution to this curriculum is to
say yes or no It is difficult to find evidence of response in the older sense of the
term – that is of a motivated engagement – and the lesson does not give us reason to
think that different responses to and interpretations of the text are in play. The
emphasis falls instead on the teacher’s interpretive work:
Annotation for what? 139
Then she has this really complicated bit about a kaleidoscope … It seems to
me that there is something symbolic here to do with how you look at things.
And maybe it’s something to do with how you see the world when you’re 10
and how you see the world when you’re 23. When you’re looking at the same
thing … it seems to me that this idea of kaleidoscope goes right through the
story in terms of colours. Now we’ve talked about light and dark that goes
through all these stories. Dark is ignorance, dark is fear; light is knowledge,
light is safety and in this one we’ve got other colours as well.
In the lesson, generally speaking, the students are called on more to listen than to
participate in a conversation., There are exceptions, but even here the ‘balance’ of
conversation tends to be in several senses unequal, shaped by the teacher’s strong
sense of the incapacity of students, their inability to enter the mysteries of textual
interpretation:
What else is mentioned in the title?
Superman, a fictional character with special powers.
TEACHER: Is Superman going to come into the story in a significant way? How?
JIM: I think it’s going to be that that’s what the snow suit is like.
TEACHER: You haven’t read the story.
JIM: Yeah I have, I’ve read a bit of it.
TEACHER: Oh. Homework four weeks ago was reading a four page story!
JOANNE: Flying.
TEACHER: Some one’s saying something about flying – can we leave that bit!
Superman is in the title, therefore it seems to me that Superman is important.
Superman is not in the story therefore Superman must be symbolic? Do you
think you need to write symbolic next to Superman at the top, unless you
already have? How many people were going to say symbolic to me?
Some students put their hands up, including Jim.
TEACHER: About four? Well no, James, you didn’t say symbolic and you had
your chance!
TEACHER:
JIM:
Of course, questions of individual teaching style and experience are important
here, in shaping the teacher’s way of addressing the class. But it is difficult to overlook a wider set of influences, which relate to the distance between many students
in urban schools and the demands of the formal curriculum. The sorts of expectation that John reveals could be read as signs of a familiar and well-established relationship between urban teachers and students, in the context of a long history of
working-class academic failure and disenchantment. In the Superman lesson, they
serve to underpin a curriculum presented to students as something beyond their
reach. In this context the do-able routines of annotation come to stand in for those
more conceptually orientated activities of which students are led to believe they
are incapable.
140 English in Urban Classrooms
Discussion
We can organize our sense of what goes on when annotation is being done through
a number of connected categories and issues. First, there is that of agency – what
kinds of capacity to act and to make meaning are available in the English classroom, and to whom are they available? In what ways do practices of annotation
relate to forms of agency? Second, there is the question of the text – What notion
of text is produced in the different practices of annotation and what consequence
do they have? There is, third, the idea of a pedagogic practice and its immediate
purposes – Does pedagogy take as its main objective the preparation for examinations, an accumulation of skills, or some other collection of purposes related to
intellectual or moral or cultural development? Fourth there is the question of
knowledge – What counts as knowledge? With whom does knowledge reside?
With the teacher as authority? With the class understood as a group-in-dialogue?
And, fifth and last, there is the question of the larger pedagogic and educational
purposes of English, the question, to put it starkly: ‘What is English for?’
The two classrooms show distinct approaches to questions of agentive capacity.
In the one, students are encouraged to participate in the production of the meanings
of the text, and the text is subject to negotiations between teacher and students. In
the other, the ‘rules’ of the classroom suggest that agency lies with the teacher: he
is the authoritative source of access to the text, and the students are relatively
unskilled. The status of the text also varies from classroom to classroom. At
Ravenscroft it is the centre of a process of enquiry and ‘cross-referral’ between
story and world. In Wayford, the text is not so central to discussion. Its meanings
are not matters for discussion, only for teacher interpretation. It supplies more a
series of facts that, at best, can serve as the basis for an effective examination
answer. To put it another way, the text is something to be mined. And what the
text-as-mine affords is the valuable ore of ‘quotes’. The value of the ore lies in
achieving the real purpose of the text, namely allowing students to succeed in the
examination. This utilization of the text is closely allied to the issue of annotation
as pedagogic practice. Allied, too, to the issue of classroom knowledge, either as
the product of a collective labour, or of the lonely work of the teacher, with annotation as the record of one or other of these processes.
Which brings us to the question of the pedagogical and educational purposes of
English, the question: ‘What is English for?’ In the first example, English consists
inter alia (the alia including the meeting of examination requirements) of the
making of meanings that connect in exploratory ways the text with the world. It
aims to offer in addition the tools that are necessary to record and elaborate these
meanings, in this case the tool of close reading through annotation. Our other
example provides a sparser view of English, although it rests on an appeal to
certain kinds of sophisticated textual expertise. English, it turns out, is like other
subjects, a means for passing or failing, except that the tools for success are largely
left implicit, and are difficult for students to access.
Chapter 10
The textual cycle of the
English classroom
The textual cycle of the classroom
Introduction
In this, the last descriptive, ‘empirical’ chapter in the book we look at the ‘textual
cycle’ of the English classroom – that is, the selection of texts, their presentation
and re-production to and for students, and the teacher’s production of new texts.
The question ‘What is an appropriate English text?’ has been and remains a highly
charged one. It has been asked and answered differently by successive governments since the beginning of the 1990s. The literary texts that are brought into the
curriculum constitute the cultural, social and ethical material with which the
teacher and the students will need to engage, and they come to form one important
element of what English can come to mean. We focus successively on moments of
this cycle to show how the larger-level social relations of education work to position teachers and students in this respect, and how they create particular versions
of English. The position of media studies in this respect is a case in point
(Buckingham and Sefton-Green 1994).
The National Curriculum for English now stipulates what kinds of texts and
authors are to be studied in the English classroom. What texts enter the classroom
and what is done to and with them is therefore a political decision, in at least two
ways. First, there is the larger public domain and controversy within it about
textual inclusion and exclusion. An example of this was the controversial effort of
the Conservative government in the early 1990s to drive texts of popular culture
from the English curriculum and to restore ‘pre-1914’ literature to Key Stages 3
and 4. Second, there are micro-political decisions, taken within the framework
established by policy, where a preference for one text rather than another can still
be exercised, even though the space for such decisions has shrunk (see Jones
2003b).
In this chapter the inflection of English through different kinds of texts found in
classrooms is explored. Through our analysis of teacher interviews we examine the
reasons why texts are selected – or not – and made available to students as their
experience of English. These texts form a crucial resource in the production of
school English. As the official curriculum makes it compulsory to study a Shakespeare play, the second part of the chapter focuses in some detail on how Macbeth
142 English in Urban Classrooms
is introduced and studied over a series of lessons in one school. In particular we try
to ‘track’ how ‘formal’ texts such as Macbeth are transformed into ‘informal’ texts
– texts made by teachers – and how these two kinds of texts relate to one another.
Texts at the level of the National Curriculum
The question ‘What is an appropriate text for English?’ was in the past answered
by English teachers in the context of the examination syllabus. At the time of
writing, however, it is answered (if not fully determined) by the National Curriculum. Before the Cox Report (DfEE 1989), the texts to be studied for English
were not prescribed. The Cox Report itself, implemented in 1990, is not prescriptive about the texts to be studied. It specifies the range and genres of texts to be
studied, and focuses on teaching methods and how to approach texts in the
classroom.
There is, however, no consensus on which works should be chosen from the
vast riches of written English and given a privileged status in the classroom.
Formulations of ‘literary tradition’, ‘our literary heritage’ or lists of ‘great
works’, however influential their proponents, may change radically during the
course of time. It would be wrong, therefore, for us to prescribe a list of set
texts. There is such a variety of good literature available for inclusion in syllabuses that we want teachers to have the freedom to make their own choice of
suitable books within the broad guidelines indicated
(DfEE 1989: section 7.14)
These broad guidelines indicate that programmes of study should be constructed
so as to give all pupils the opportunity to work with a wide range of literary forms.
The list included short stories, novels, plays and poems, biographies, autobiographies, diaries, film or TV scripts, works from different parts of the world and pretwentieth-century writing. The Cox Report also states that ‘In particular, every
pupil should be given at least some experience of the plays or poetry of Shakespeare’ (DfEE 1989: section 7.15).
In 1992 the government reviewed the curriculum recommended in the Cox
Report, and in 1993 a new National Curriculum was implemented on the basis of
that review. While the scope and range of texts remained relatively stable, the
National Curriculum became increasingly prescriptive in character specifying the
range of texts and a list of authors whose writing should be studied. During Key
Stages 3 and 4 students were expected, as a minimum, to read one play by Shakespeare, a drama, some fiction published before 1900, a range of other fiction by ‘reputable writers’, poetry by two poets published before 1900, and poetry by three other
major poets. 1993 also saw the introduction of SATS (Standard Attainment Targets)
alongside the National Curriculum, which included testing on non-fiction or ‘informational’ texts as well as Shakespeare. The curriculum was revised again in 1995,
although this was considered to be a basic ‘tidying up’ of the previous version.
The textual cycle of the classroom 143
The version of the curriculum in operation during the period of our study
demonstrates that since the early 1990s there has been a merging of the curriculum
and of examinations, leading to the production of restrictions and prescriptions of
texts. The National Curriculum (DfEE 1999) stipulates which kinds of texts and
authors are considered appropriate to be studied in English. Despite the prescriptive character of the official curriculum, the list nevertheless adds up to approximately 5,000 books, short stories and poems, leaving teachers ‘overloaded with
unrealistic choices’ and the work of finding ‘ways of taking the imposed oath
without perjury’ (Preen 1998). Indeed, in the case of poetry, examination boards
have responded to the National Curriculum by the production of poetry anthologies that mediate curriculum and examination requirements. The increasing
control of the selection of texts by central government via policy serves to heighten
the political nature of the role of texts in English, and bears on notions of ‘access’
and ‘equity’.
The National Curriculum provides ‘guidance’ on the ‘knowledge, skills and
understanding’ that students are expected to develop in reading at Key Stages 3
and 4 in the form of competencies that students ‘should be taught’. These ‘competencies’ are presented under the sub-headings of: understanding texts; English
literary heritage; texts from different cultures; printed and ICT-based information
texts; media and moving-image texts; language structure and variation. This policy
framework positions texts as the material for the development of ‘knowledge,
skills and understanding’. In the process the entity ‘English text’ is constructed in a
number of ways: as meaning; as a sign of authorial intent; as heritage; as (popular)
culture and tradition; as informational resource; and as knowledge about language.
To this extent, the meaning of ‘text’ has shifted decisively away from that of text as
a literary concept. The analyses of work with texts in classrooms that we have
shown decisively demonstrate that.
As our chapters so far suggest, however, the relationship between policy and
how it is realized and inflected in what ‘actually happens’ in the classrooms is a
complex one, with a range of diverse social forces in operation. In other words,
schools, teachers, students and others are involved in the re-inflecting and transforming of national policies in their appearance in particular sites (Ball 1990).
Texts at the level of classroom
During the data-gathering part of our research, we observed teachers and students
working with a wide range of texts. Media texts that were used in lessons included
newspapers, film trailers, and the opening sequences of television programmes
(such as The Simpsons, PJ’s, ER and Buffy the Vampire Slayer). We observed
three classes working with plays, two with Shakespeare plays (Macbeth and
Romeo and Juliet), and one with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Two modules of
work focused on ‘wider reading’, comparing in one case the short stories
Theresa’s Wedding (William Trevor) and Three Sisters (Austen), and in the other
Kiss Miss Carol (Dhondy) and Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit
144 English in Urban Classrooms
(Plath). One of the classes that we observed was studying poems from the ‘Hearts
and Partners’ anthology.
The teacher’s selection of texts is seen by some commentators as primarily a
choice based on their understanding of the function of literature and the meaning of
personal growth, cultural heritage, skills based learning and the transformatory
view of literature (Marshall 2000). By contrast we view the texts that appear in the
classroom, and how these are worked with, as reaching beyond the teacher’s
personal philosophy of English. Indeed these texts can, as we will show, stand in
stark contrast to the teachers’ expressed philosophies. Like others (such as Sarland
1991) we see a range of factors shaping teachers’ selection of texts. These include
the resources available in the school, the teacher’s perception of the literary quality
and status of a text, their perception of students’ interests and ability, and the characteristics of the student intake of the school, in particular students’ ethnicity,
culture, language and religion. These underpinned the teachers’ and departmental
principles for the selection of texts, and shaped the sense of what makes a text relevant for students.
Texts in Springton School
Springton School is situated in a locality made up of a wide range of different
ethnic communities; the norm of most inner-urban London schools. When interviewed, Anna, a teacher at the school, described the school’s student population
as follows (this matches official information on the school):
It is quite a deprived school. It is in one of the ten most deprived areas of the
country and it did have 70 per cent free school meals but I think it has gone
down slightly, just under 70 per cent now, and it was 50 per cent Bengali but
again I think that may have fallen just a little bit, I think it is about 45 per cent
and there is 20 per cent of the school that are refugees and there are a lot of
Somali kids as well and there is a disproportionate number of girls to boys so I
think it is 40 something girls to 50 something boys.
There is, and has historically been, considerable tensions between the ethnic
groups in the community that the school serves, tensions that are realized along
racial and ethnic lines in the form of street violence. In response, the ethos of the
school, and of the English department more specifically, is to attempt to harmonize
the fractures (along racial and ethnic lines) within the local community. This desire
to harmonize emerged in interviews with each of the three teachers. The Head of
the English Department, Susan, commented in interview, for example, that:
I think one of the things that is great about the school, there are issues and
conflicts that go on outside school. There is quite a gang culture outside
school, there [are] tensions between various racial groups as well. It doesn’t
generally spill over into what happens at school. Although you have some of
The textual cycle of the classroom 145
the posturing generally you don’t have anything too… it never boils up particularly and I think one of the reasons is because they see school as a calm place.
In the Ofsted report it was described like an ‘oasis of calm in a troubled area’,
which I think is the best way of describing it
This teacher’s comments suggest a polarity between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of
the school, a perception that was echoed by the other teachers at the school. In the
English classroom this polarity is realized (at least in part) as a separation between
the students’ lived experiences in and of the world outside of the school, and the
‘stuff’ of the classroom. During the lessons that we observed, the teachers did not,
for instance, refer to or draw on the students’ experiences, beliefs or values; nor did
the students offer these in the classroom. Instead the teachers’ and the departmental focus was on the production of English as a subject with a clear body of
knowledge for examination: ‘when they go into maths or science they are learning
things that are new to them and they can tangibly feel that and they like to feel that
in English that it is something they wouldn’t normally encounter’ (Susan).
The students who were interviewed did not, however, view English as comparable with these subjects; also, they emphasized the school–society connections
rather than their separation (as this excerpt from a group interview with students
from one teacher’s (Julia) class shows):
KALEEM: …what you are being taught from a science teacher is different from
what you are being taught by an English teacher ’cos you are learning about
the outside world, the things that happen with animal cells, human organisms
and that, space. In English it is very different.
INTERVIEWER: If you learn about the outside world in science, what do you learn
about in English?
K: The inside I guess, about society and culture.
When interviewed by the project researcher, some students spontaneously
connected their community knowledge of arranged marriage with the text they
were studying, Romeo and Juliet. This is a move that neither they nor the teacher
brought to the classroom despite there being a high percentage of students in the
class who are Muslim, who are therefore likely to have communal knowledge of
‘arranged marriage’, and access to a range of cultural notions of love. One teacher
(Julia) commented:
I think partly because although all of our students really share or are bicultural, they do live in London and they straddle their two or three cultures
sometimes very successfully and I know in the past, especially the humanities
for example, if all the examples you give are ‘oh, this is in Bangladesh’ or ‘oh,
this is development in Africa’ and you hope you are going to reach out to the
students. Actually they get a bit fed up with it so I think the idea has to be
good-quality literature and examples so that the themes, because they are
going to be universal, because that is what literature is, they can relate to those
and sometimes, I suppose you have to create an ethos in the school where it is
146 English in Urban Classrooms
fine for everybody to talk about different cultures and if you are looking at a
book written by a different author, a non-British author, then it is going to be
fine. But we do poems from other cultures as part of the GCSE but I have not
noticed that people make any comment on that.
The teacher’s genuine desire to ‘reach out to’ the variety of cultural experiences
of the students could have led her to turn towards a position of ‘cultural hybridity’
rather than one of ‘universalism’, and of literature as ways of overcoming cultural
polarities. The departmental notion of literature, embedded in the notion of classic
texts, appears to be more closely connected to the universal. However, the teachers’ regard for the stability that the National Curriculum provides has its effects
here: at the very least, elements of contentiousness around the meanings that can
be made with literary texts are removed from the work of the teacher.
The students’ comments suggest that ‘cultural hybridity’ is a position that at
least some of them have adopted. When interviewed, the Muslim students spontaneously related Romeo and Juliet to their family culture as opposed to their own
transformed ‘British culture’, and drew on both these sets of cultural experiences
to explore the play, as shown in this excerpt of interview transcript:
The interesting thing is he [Shakespeare] talks about the human nature
– his things are based on it – it is all happening now, this, isn’t it? In Muslim
religions if you are going out with a girl or boy, it’s not allowed basically,
unless you really really love them or something, but that is where hatred and
conflict comes in between the two families, and he talks about, Shakespeare
writes about it, and he puts his knowledge in the book. It is very interesting.
NAJMA: Because you know in our culture, Bengali culture, and the Muslim thing
you are not allowed to go out with boys and girls, and girls usually get married
young, init, and that is where Juliet comes into the thing.
MAHMOOD: Yeah, that’s the Asian culture. There is laws and stuff. The fighting
between two families, that still happens in a lot of places and the love story.
KAALIM: It’s one of my mate’s brother, he love this girl but he couldn’t get her.
INTERVIEWER: Because she didn’t like him?
K: Her parents and family, they disapprove and he got kind of mental [breakdown] … It is really strange when you see films based on this stuff, because in
our family something has happened and you watch a film with all these things
happening – it certainly happens to your family. You end up feeling, you
know.
HANEEF:
In Springton School we have established that the teachers work with texts in
what we think of – at least at one level – as ‘universalist’ terms. By contrast, the
students interweave their reading of these texts with their own cultural experiences
and knowledge. However, the students find it difficult to bring their cultural readings of these texts into English as it is realized in the school classroom. ‘Universalism’ conforms to the teachers’ aspirations for social relations in the school; by
The textual cycle of the classroom 147
contrast, the students with their informal policy make the connections between
(their meanings of) the texts, and their world.
The ‘universalist’ character inflected in the choice of texts for English in this
school fits well with the rhetoric of ‘equity and access for all’ that is embedded in
the National Curriculum. The choice of text and the English department ethos are
closely interrelated, through the ways in which this department’s ethos inflects and
shapes the teachers’ mediation of texts in their teaching of English. Canonical literature, such as the texts featured in this school, can be taught in a way that recognizes the positions that different students may have to them, while not making
them foregrounded and potentially problematic. A teacher may set out to bring out
all that they know and assume about the valued community cultures of their
students. Alternatively, a teacher may teach the same literature in an attempt to
‘replace’ student culture with a dominant culture of ‘Englishness’. Or an English
teacher may choose to work with texts that in their terms reflect the range of
cultures in the school.
Texts in Wayford School
Despite the lack of a coherent departmental ethos in Wayford School, and the
many differences between the teachers’ realization of English in the classrooms
that we observed, there are shared principles that underlie the teachers’ choice of
texts. These reflect the department’s particular stance to the student population
and English, mediated by notions of culture and of the social as central to the
production of English. The teachers’ choice of texts was actively informed by
their perceptions of the culturally shaped experiences of students’ lives outside of
the school, experiences that the teachers drew on explicitly and implicitly in their
teaching. The texts were contemporary, or mediated – as film, for instance – to
relate to contemporary experiences and issues. They dealt with themes of poverty,
innocence, class and race. The teachers commented on the need to relate texts to
the cultures of the students.
For instance, in one series of lessons taught by John, the short story Kiss Miss
Carol was the text for study. It explores the school production of A Christmas
Carol through the eyes of Jolil, a Bengali boy who lives in London’s East End, in
particular his father’s response to Jolil’s role as Tiny Tim. The teacher (John)
commented when interviewed:
Um, Kiss Miss Carol [Farrukh Dhondy] we do because we are a multicultural
school. Thirty-five per cent of our kids are Bangladeshi. There are kids here
who are refugees, who are private school kids from Afghanistan. There are
kids here from Somalia, or whatever, who went to private schools and there
are kids who come here who are essentially peasants, no sense of schooling at
all, who have never been to school and are 16 years old, so there is a huge
range.
148 English in Urban Classrooms
The teachers in Wayford (John, Lizzy and Stephen) commented on the need to
relate texts to the representational forms that inform the life-worlds of the students,
a focus that is also realized in the classroom displays of this school discussed
earlier in Chapter 3. When interviewed, Lizzy said:
For a kid like Joseph for example, whose older brother is now applying for a
course to become an animator, so there is a real audience for it and Joseph can
express himself very well through pictures and respond to Manga comics,
Manga videos, in a way he won’t respond to anything else and there is
precious little opportunity for that.
John gave the following reasons for selecting Kiss Miss Carol:
I like it as a story. I think it is charming and I think it brings up quite interesting
things because the main thing we deal with through the stories is to do with relationship between parent and children or adults and children and there is another
theme that goes through the other stories to do with becoming an adult, realizing
what the world is like, kind of thing … you can look at class. I touch on coming
from another country is equivalent to what happens in Sons Veto which is
working-class girl marrying a middle-class man and coming to London. It is
different cultures. I tend to use the word culture for class, religion, etc.
Later during the interview John commented further on his view of ‘culture’:
I always have a broad range of reference things. I talk about culture before we
do culture and traditions. I will say, I don’t say ‘God’ so much as I will say
‘Our Buddah’ or whatever. There is always a broadness of it. I always link,
like when we are talking about Bangladeshis, you can cross out the word
Bangladeshi – this is any culture that comes here and I am in that category as
well. In a different easier time, as an Australian, I come in I don’t know these
things.
John’s comments on culture and his selection of texts suggest that for him, as a
teacher, there is a homology between certain kinds of story and certain kinds of
student experience. At the same time, he defines culture as a broad category in
opposition to the dominant English culture and Christian religion. In doing so, the
teacher negates race and ethnicity as key factors thus enabling himself to join the
same category of ‘cultural other’ that he understands his students as occupying.
The students who were interviewed identified their social class and ‘race’ as key
factors in shaping their educational, work and general life opportunities, as one
student, Benjamin commented:
I think class and race is one of the biggest issues of the day. Class makes you
know where you are going to go like if you go to a private school it is much
The textual cycle of the classroom 149
more likely you are going to get to University and get a better job. Here it is
more likely [a student] from [a local independent school] is more likely to get
a better job than I am.
Several students contested the teacher’s (John) notion of culture and his mediation of it via the use of the text in the classroom. The following three episodes offer
examples of the students’ resistance to the teacher’s interpretation of the events of
the story through their own cultural readings both of the text and the teacher’s positioning of himself and them. These also show how some students, both ‘White’ and
‘Black’, acted to diffuse the potential for different interpretations of culture to
come into conflict.
Episode one
Is there anything anyone wants to say? Anything about Jolil’s
relationship with his father?’
MADI: They’re always together.
SUNDI: He’s always telling him things about how White people are bad.
T: [to Sundi] Do you think things like that?
S: No.
T: Good boy. Why did I say that?
BENJAMIN: [quietly] ’Cos you’re White.
JIM: ’Cos he’s a boy, and he’s good!
M: ’Cos it means he’s [Sundi] not racist.
T: Thank you – yes.
JOHN (TEACHER):
Episode two
Khalil [Jolil’s brother in the story] is in front of the mirror,
doing ‘being a good Bangladeshi boy’: shoes with buckles, striped trousers,
black shirt.
NADEEM: [mutters] ‘Oh God, sir!’
T: That’s what they tell me, my Year 7 Bangladeshi girls: that’s being a good
Bangladeshi boy!
N: [mutters] That’s looking smart.
TEACHER (JOHN):
Episode three
I’ve watched programmes on television and because I used to work in
the East End I used to see them – little kids, particularly people new to the
country, get paid next to nothing, if you haven’t got the English you end up
doing exciting things like sewing loops onto belts and you get paid by the
thousand. The way to get somewhere is to work. That’s why he [Jolil’s father]
doesn’t want him to be in the play because school is about work not about fun.
TEACHER:
150 English in Urban Classrooms
He doesn’t want him to be in the play ’cos he didn’t want his son to
play a beggar!
T: Just write it down.
NADEEM:
Through the study of the text the teacher, John, positions culture as central to
English and language as central to successful participation in the dominant culture;
in this, English has a mediating potential for his students to succeed. He comments
when interviewed:
That language is power and knowledge is power – able to use language will
get you power of the broadest possible sense – it will get you what you want
when you go to a meeting or see somebody – being able to go to a library and
use it. Being able to speak in the right way at the right time to get your jobs. It
comes down to that. Power is the main thing. That is what I teach. How to get
power … In a psychological sense I think it [English] matters. In a social sense
and an economic sense, an educational sense, English is the only thing at the
moment that really focuses on the nature of how to get anywhere in society – it
isn’t a question of just getting a grade.
Lizzy and Stephen, the two other teachers that we observed at Wayford School,
worked to enable the students to bring their ‘own’ experiences as mediated by
social class and race into the classroom via the texts they worked with, rather than
teacher perceptions and interpretations of the students’ cultures. Nonetheless, all
the teachers that we observed at Wayford School selected texts that both mediate
the curriculum and foreground cultural themes. Within this school, we argue that
the selection of texts mediates the purpose of English as being for life not for examination. As one student (Madi, a refugee from Kosovo) commented when
interviewed:
Basically, these stories they aren’t for English people. I ain’t being racist or
anything, but it isn’t for people that live in England. It is basically for people
who come here. Like if a Bangladesh person comes here and reads that story,
he is going to know, because that story is, basically, it is not your story. Like a
Bangladesh person is going to know how to adapt to England and it is basically for them.
Texts in Ravenscroft School
There is a strong departmental ethos in Ravenscroft school, in contrast to the last,
and this ethos informs the process by which particular texts appear in the English
classroom: the teachers share, discuss and select the texts and ways of working
with the texts collaboratively. As Irene, the Head of the English Department, said
in interview:
The textual cycle of the classroom 151
We talk about ‘owning things’ and it is to do with team work as well, pooling
together all of our ideas, deciding what we think will meet the needs of
students best. Somebody might have information from another quarter that
this is a good text, so what we tend to do is bring in all of our ideas, review
books, talk about what this has to offer and then we agree, looking at all that
we have, which books would be best to use to achieve the aims and objectives.
The texts that we saw being taught draw on the list of the official curriculum,
authors such as Jane Austen, William Trevor and Norman Mailer. Some of the
texts selected for study were rather obscure. These were meant to offer the students
access to cultural and social themes that the teachers perceived as relevant to the
students’ interests and lives, and to the ‘best’ of literature. Irene again:
I am always looking back in order to look forward because time has gone by
when the children weren’t that engaged, the texts weren’t interesting maybe,
didn’t reflect their experiences possibly and so children didn’t see themselves
in the situations which we were bringing into the classroom and so that was
something we had to address. How to engage these students and so look carefully at the text as I said and decide ‘this is an exciting story’. Has it got
substance? Has it got mileage? Because you can’t [just] give them this excitement, has to have some meaning, some substance to it, so at the end of the day
you are contributing to their learning experience.
When I first arrived [in 1985] I had the experience where in the department
Shakespeare wasn’t taught … I thought ‘Shakespeare is supposed to be the
best writer, and if he is why are these children not exposed to the best writer?’
It didn’t matter what I might think and there are texts lying in the stockcupboard collecting dust. I decided that I was going to try out Macbeth with
my two Year 11 classes. They did well and after that we decided ‘yes, all children should have access to the best’. Always give them the best that is on
offer.
This teacher, and the English department in Ravenscroft School more generally,
value literature as offering a framework as a resource for the students in their lives;
as a ‘life experience’ for the students; ‘a window’ through which to view the social
world: marriage, gender, religion, culture and human nature.
You see because they [students] are not able and they are of a young age to
participate in the things they are reading about, it gives them some insight. It is
personal development and intellectual development as well. … Therefore we
are trying to prepare them, something for that world, something that they
possibly might encounter later in life. It might be that they look back at some
experience in the classroom and they say ‘I’ve come across this before’.
(Irene)
152 English in Urban Classrooms
The departmental focus on classic authors and the ‘best’ texts, on literature as a
window on the social world, positions English in this school against a current in
English teaching in which ‘everyday’ texts are brought into the classroom (as in
the case of Lizzy in Springton School).
Choice of texts across schools and classrooms
Plainly, in one sense the texts that were studied in the classrooms we observed
were there because teachers had chosen them. However, the teachers are institutionally positioned, so that for example exam constraints steer them towards
particular texts (Sarland 1991). They are also discursively positioned, and it is on
the basis of their positioning that they make their choices of texts.
In Springton School, ‘classic’ texts were chosen, and they were positioned by
teachers as both having universal and high status for students and parents, and
constituting the main body of knowledge for examination. The potential of these
texts to relate to ‘human experiences’ was not a tool used by the teachers to draw in
the diversity of the students’ experiences. During the lessons that we observed the
students did not articulate the links between the texts and their own lives that they
made very articulately in the interview. The location of the school in an ethnically
diverse and divided community produced the ethos of the school as a kind of
‘retreat from the street’. The Head of the English Department (Susan) commented
that the school had been described as an ‘oasis of calm’ in a troubled area in a
recent Ofsted report. The boundary between ‘in school’ and ‘out of school’ was
strongly marked in the classrooms of Springton School by the absence of references and links between the two. The focus remained firmly on curriculum and
examination – a different kind of response to the diverse resources of the student
body focused on access to linguistic resources and classic texts.
In Wayford School the texts that we saw in the classrooms were contemporary,
and had been explicitly chosen to reflect and connect with the ‘multicultural lifeworlds’ of the students. The ethnically and linguistically diverse student population was mentioned by all of the teachers who participated in the project. The need
to ‘engage’ students in school English and in the school more generally was ranked
as a high priority by the teachers in a school with considerable truancy problems.
Texts were used in English as a tool to mediate social difference and cultural diversity, and in an attempt to engage with the students’ life worlds, in an attempt to
make English ‘relevant’. However, while this may have been the teachers’
professed position in the interviews, in the case of the teacher John, it was his
perception of the students’ culture that dominated the discussion of the texts being
studied. The students’ comments on the texts and culture were frequently
dismissed as ‘untrue’ or ‘incorrect’. In this way, the notion of culture itself became
a ‘curricularized’ fact within English. Each of the teachers that we observed at
Wayford School viewed English as a forum for the development of self and
connected to the potential in life, either in relation to work and power or in relation
to self-awareness and communication.
The textual cycle of the classroom 153
The teachers in Ravenscroft School speak from yet another position in English
teaching, that of working-class and Black students having a right of access to ‘the
best’. Their position is produced at the intersection of particular ideas about high
culture, and the experience of urban schooling. Institutionally, what gives further
weight to this position is the nature of the school with its mix of elements of selection and many Black ‘high achievers’, and the nature of the National Curriculum
and the priority that it gives to the study of ‘Shakespeare’.
Bringing the text into the classroom: Macbeth in
Springton School
The selection of texts for English is only one part of the ‘textual cycle’. In the
remainder of the chapter we focus on how texts are brought into the classroom. In
particular we show how this process is shaped by the demands of the curriculum,
by the teachers’ perception of the students’ interests and ability, and by the
resources of the school. We discuss how the teacher Anna in Springton School
brings Macbeth into the classroom and ‘prepares it for examination’ over a series
of twelve lessons. We attempt to draw out how what happens to texts in the classroom often stands in stark contrast to the teacher’s ideas of English expressed in
interview, and how the text itself is produced in ways that provide students with
different resources for making meaning, and, ultimately for learning.
The text of Macbeth takes some time to ‘appear’ in the classroom. In the first
two lessons the teacher, Anna, does not tell the students that they are going to be
studying Macbeth: the play is introduced in the third lesson. The series of twelve
lessons focuses on five broad areas of work, and in each of these areas the text
Macbeth is realized differently modally and features in a different way. The first of
these areas, the focus of lessons one and two, is the social and historical context for
Macbeth. In these lessons the text is quite literally not present for the students.
These first two lessons provide a context that later will allow the teacher to connect
Macbeth with her sense of the students’ interest in witchcraft and superstition. She
sees it as ‘a way into’ the text for the students that relates it to the National Curriculum and to the coursework requirements.
The second area of work, the focus of lessons three to five, is the analysis and
‘deconstruction’ of Act I, Scene i of the play. This is achieved in the first instance
through a reading of the scene as written, and then through watching and
analysing two film versions of the scene, one of which is an animated film. The
third area of work can be described as the students’ construction, through performance, of their own version of the scene in lesson six. In the next two lessons,
seven and eight, the students move on to study the plot of the whole play, not
through the script of the play, but through a film version, and through images of
key moments in the plot. The fifth area of work, attended to in the final four
lessons in the series, focuses on the coursework essay on Macbeth, its planning
and writing. Below we discuss the way in which the text is realized and features
in relation to each of these areas.
154 English in Urban Classrooms
Creating a context for the text – creating the text?
Since the early 1990s there has been a marked shift in the teaching of Shakespeare. This is epitomized in the currency of Rex Gibson’s (1998) approach to the
teaching of Shakespeare. It has led to the publication of the Cambridge School
Shakespeare series in which pages of Shakespearean text alternate with pages of
practical, activity-orientated approaches to exploring the meaning of the text. The
imperative for taking these ‘active approaches’ to the teaching of Shakespeare is
derived from ways of studying Shakespeare that have been made compulsory for
students in the lower years of secondary school, which culminate in a standardized test for fourteen-year-olds. This has demanded an approach that attempts to
engage the interest of younger students through involvement in practical activity.
These approaches have percolated through into the study of Shakespeare for
public examination at the age of sixteen and into advanced study after that. These
moves have reconfigured the teaching of Shakespearean text.
The central argument of Gibson and others is that the key to making Shakespeare accessible is the vividness and energy that is to be found in Shakespeare’s
language. This energy is said to hold universal appeal to students, if teachers can
find ways to immerse students in the text. Such ‘immersion’ can be encouraged by
allowing students to play with the language and accompanying action and, through
this, to experience the sensory and sensual nature of Shakespeare’s text. The
underlying view of the Shakespearean text is that rather than treating it as a ‘sacred
text’ to be approached intellectually, the plays should be experienced as ‘living’
text for performance. Playfulness is seen as a ‘point of entry’ into the text, ‘inhabiting’ the text and, through this, motivating the students towards more traditional
scholarly approaches to textual interpretation, through practices such as close
reading and annotation. The sensory nature of word play in Shakespearean text, its
rhythm and rhyme, rich imagery, all serve to aid an active animation of the text.
Such an approach has been lent support and given academic and dramatic credibility through historical and experimental approaches to ‘playing’ Shakespeare
developed by such organizations as Globe Education and Shakespeare’s Globe
Theatre. Many London teachers and school students have had access to workshops
at a centre such as this. These facilities can be seen to be a real resource supporting
teachers’ attempts to convince students that studying Shakespeare can be ‘fun’ and
relevant as well as being a compulsory requirement of the curriculum. To ‘inhabit’
Shakespearean text through such active approaches renders the text less remote as
a canonical object of study, and closer to students’ lives.
Lesson one focused on the issue of ‘witchcraft’. The lesson started with a wholeclass discussion of witchcraft and the students’ expectations and associations with
witches, and their knowledge of the crimes and accusations associated with them.
The teacher instructed the students to make a poster of a witch to show ‘what
witches look like’ and to answer the questions ‘what they have’ and ‘what they do’.
Lesson two explored the ‘historical context’ of life in the seventeenth century.
The teacher asked the students to imagine and write about what life in 1603
The textual cycle of the classroom 155
would have been like, with no formal state, no modern science, technology or
education, a stronghold of religion and superstition. As Anna said when
interviewed:
I am quite interested in witchcraft anyway and one of the things I really love
about English and what I always try and do when I am teaching something is
to set it in an historical context, because I think it is really important, and how
our responses changes as the context changes so I knew I wanted to set up
where they had a strong understanding of the context.
The next task Anna set for the students was to match five pictures on a sheet to
five written characteristics that ‘define’ witches, such as ‘They can fly through the
air, and can make themselves invisible at will’. The teacher gave the students an
information sheet on witchcraft that she had made from information on the Internet
and a series of questions to answer on it ‘in full sentences’. Questions included, for
example, ‘What is a “sabbath”’ and ‘What was thought to take place at one?’,
‘What is heresy?’, ‘Who passed the first act (law) against witchcraft?’, ‘When?’
and ‘Why was James I so “terrified” of witches?’ The students’ homework was to
do research on James I and witch-hunts.
During these two lessons the text to be studied is not foregrounded; indeed, it is
not mentioned until the end of lesson two, and then only to indicate what the next
lesson will focus on. These two lessons ostensibly focus on providing a ‘social and
historical context’ for the play (as outlined in the teacher’s lesson plan and a
requirement of the National Curriculum). Alongside this, however, Anna’s
comments when interviewed suggest that the focus on witchcraft is a strategy for
engaging the students with the text via this theme.
I didn’t tell them for a while what we were doing. I don’t know if you were
here for the first few days, when I set it up. I didn’t tell them we were doing
Macbeth, I just got them to think about what life would be like then, and that
did seem to catch them a bit, catch their imagination and get them to think
about witchcraft and they also respond quite well – if you give them something complicated, something new they have learnt, I don’t know if I have
shown you this – this sheet which is all about the history of witchcraft at the
time and they really respond to that because it is something completely
different, something they don’t know. That always seems to have a kind of
calming effect on classes.
It also reflects Anna’s strategy, shared by the other teachers in the English
department of Springton School, to break down work in English into manageable
chunks. This strategy and the elements it breaks English into clearly reflect the
teachers’ sense of the demands of the curriculum. In the process it produces
English as a set of facts, and learning as a matter of knowledge of the play: a curriculum of ‘facts’. As Anna commented when interviewed:
156 English in Urban Classrooms
They always go ‘ugh, not History’ and things like that when I do that sort of
stuff but I don’t generally have classroom problems when they are doing stuff
like that. They get on with it and also, because it is a kind of comprehension,
they are quite straightforward questions and they like comprehension a lot and
it is almost like a closed task; they can see the ending. They can see what they
have achieved.
This ‘breaking down’ of the process of study, and of the text Macbeth itself,
reflects the teacher’s perception – and as we showed in Chapter 5, construction – of
the students’ ‘ability’. It is also the teacher’s response to the classroom management issues that she is faced with in Springton School.
The analysis of Act I, Scene i
The second area of work, the focus of lessons three to five, is the analysis and
deconstruction of Act I, Scene i of the play. In the first instance, this happens in
relation to the written text of the scene, and then through watching and analysing
two film versions of the same scene in lessons four and five.
In lesson three Anna gave the students a worksheet that she had made: the top
half listed a series of questions directed towards a scene analysis, and the bottom
half presented a photocopied version of the scene. The worksheet also instructed
the students ‘This piece of work must be at LEAST one side of A4 long’. The questions on the worksheet are as follows:
Explain what takes place during the scene – what happens?
Pick out interesting images or language used and explain what effects are
being created.
Does this scene give the audience any clues to the important themes of the
play?
Does this scene prepare the audience for future plot development?
What effect might this scene have on the audience?
These questions can be seen as Anna’s mediation of the examination requirements. The combined effect of these questions on the scene is to present Macbeth
as a kind of worksheet, in which the scene is dislocated from the play as a whole.
This fragmentation of the play is a material consequence of the examination
requirements, and possibly of Anna’s perception of Macbeth as a text that the
students will find difficult, which is also suggested by her comments during the
interview:
I decided this year, because they do find it so daunting, I decided just to do the
first scene and get them to focus on that in a lot of detail, and I thought it was
something they could get a handle on and they could get to know it really well,
and understand it well, so it should make writing about it easier, but yes, I am
The textual cycle of the classroom 157
not sure about whether they actually understood the whole story of Macbeth,
because of the way we did it, because we did it afterwards.
Throughout the series of twelve lessons the students are not given access to the
written text of whole play, nor to any other acts or scenes. This reflects the particular focus on examination in the lessons, and of the Springton English department
more generally. Anna commented when interviewed that:
I don’t know whether they actually understood the story so well, but then
really, for what they were actually being asked to do for their coursework, they
didn’t actually have to. It is a kind of shame, because I think, it is a real shame
not to teach the whole play, but from past experience I know they actually find
that really difficult, and they would have switched off and not written the
essay or not written them so well. The other thing I do is to make sure everything I teach them is quite short. Because their attention and the amount of
enthusiasm and interest they can show is very limited.
While Anna’s rationale for focusing on one scene within the play is clear it
stands in stark conflict with her understanding of the educational purpose of
English. Certainly, Springton School’s focus on ‘student ability’ in relation to the
demands of the curriculum, does not enable Anna’s philosophy towards the texts
of English, professed in her previous comment and the following one, to be realized in the classroom.
Where I am coming from with English is because I have a real passion for
reading, that is what I really want to get across to them, maybe sort of
encourage them to read a little bit. I want them to achieve and do well in their
exams and things, although I think it is a shame that so much is structured
around exams, because it does change how you teach. Sometimes that is quite
good because it keeps the pace up, but the way you teach the text, you can’t
just, well you have to learn how to teach and you can enjoy it. This year I really
think they enjoyed a lot of it, because my attitude wasn’t like ‘we have to do
the whole play’, kind of picking out bits and teaching those bits, and it is the
same with Macbeth, picking out one bit, but I do think that is a shame that they
don’t get to read the whole.
… As they go, so when they sit an exam, to give them a fair chance you
have to teach them quite a lot of exam technique, teach very much towards the
exam, which is a shame, because I think at Year 9 there is a lot of other things
you could be doing
As we have pointed out, the degree to which examination and the official curriculum feature in the classroom varies between the schools in our study. The fragmentation of the text here does not happen in Wayford and Ravencroft Schools (as
discussed in Chapter 6). In those schools, the curriculum is mediated through
158 English in Urban Classrooms
different concerns of the teachers, whereas here the relationship between the
National Curriculum and the actualization of English in the classrooms is much
more immediate. As we have insisted, teachers make decisions as to how to
mediate and transform the curriculum, and the choice of text and ways of dealing
with texts reflect this.
Lesson four centred on the viewing and analysis of the representation of the
scene in a contemporary film of Macbeth, made for television. Anna and her
students watched the scene five times, and at each repeat viewing the teacher
focused the students’ attention on a specific aspect of the representation: the
setting, the appearance of the witches, how they spoke their lines, the mood and
atmosphere created. The students commented on the visual depiction of the
witches, mentioning their ‘ugly, crooked noses’, ‘warts’, ‘dirty, bad teeth’ and
‘raggy clothes’. The use of the voice – rather than the language of the lines themselves – to ‘stretch out’ words, as well as the witches’ ‘itchy’, ‘scratchy’ voices,
was commented on by the students. They talked about how the film’s setting of the
scene, a battlefield in a foggy valley, created an ‘evil’ atmosphere. The students
were set the task of responding, in writing, to questions on each of these aspects
(for example, ‘How is the setting depicted?’), and to evaluate the representation of
the witches in the scene.
In lesson five the students are offered another representation of the scene, an
animated film version. Using the same questions as in lesson four, the students
analyse the scene as they repeatedly watch it. In addition to this they are asked to
discuss ‘What can you tell about the action of the play from this scene?’ and ‘What
questions about the rest of the play do you have?’ The teacher addressed these
questions by showing them the rest of the film version of Macbeth, stopping the
video at the end of each scene, summarizing characters and plot, and clarifying
names, places and details of the play. Although Anna does not tell the students
what their coursework will be, she comments, ‘To do your coursework you need to
understand what happens in the rest of Macbeth – so no talking while the film is
on’. The homework set by the teacher involves the students in evaluating the
images of witchcraft in the film and in the animated versions of the scene, and
discussing which version they prefer. Anna commented on her choice of film
during the interview:
I showed them the video, the beginning of the animated version, and they had
to analyse that. We have done quite a lot of media work, sort of analysing
images, and they tend to quite like that, and the boys like anything that
involves TV, so that is always a good plan … a lot of them while they will be
fazed analysing the scene, and they wait for others to forward their opinions,
but when you get them to talk about television they can come out with really
amazingly intelligent things, and even though it is just in a different form, I
always find it quite fascinating that they are really good at analysing the television … I think they are just not frightened of it, because they understand it,
whereas where they have like an unusual language in front of them, their
The textual cycle of the classroom 159
confidence goes and they can’t understand it, also it is just too much effort.
Obviously I am generalizing massively.
The making of a new text
By this point in the series of lessons Anna has introduced the students to the written
scene and two realizations of it on film. In the lesson that follows, lesson six, she
sets them the task of performing the scene in the class. The lesson centres on the
students’ construction, through performance, of their own version of Act I, Scene i.
At this point in the series of lessons the textual realizations of Macbeth analysed in
the earlier lessons become a resource for the students’ production of the text.
Anna introduces the lesson by saying: ‘Right, what we are going to do this
morning is work on how you can make this an effective scene.’ Working with the
whole class, she allocates three students to read the lines of the three witches and
one student to read the stage directions. The students read through the lines without
using a ‘performance-voice’, stumbling over the words, and speaking out of time
with one another; the rhythm of the lines is lost. The teacher asks them to read
through the scene one more time and asks if the students have any questions. The
students’ questions refer to the meaning of the words (for example, ‘ere’ and ‘hurly
burly’). This is the first lesson in which the meaning of the lines is focused on.
The teacher informs the students that she wants them to stage the scene in an
‘innovative’ and ‘imaginative’ way. She asks them to draw on the film versions of
the scene they have watched, and to think what resources they could use in the
staging of the scene. The move from the film representations of the scene to the
students’ performance of it in the classroom illustrates the teacher’s strategy of
starting with a medium (film) and mode of distribution (television) that the
students are familiar with, and moving to one that is unfamiliar to many. The
students suggest that they can use the resources of voice, body movement and
facial expressions in their staging. The teacher demonstrates how to use voice to
slow down a line for emphasis.
The teacher then asks the students to organize themselves into groups of four:
three students are to take the roles of the witches and the fourth the role of director.
Several of the students in each group arrange their clothes, coats and scarves and
hooded tops, to form cloaks and to cover their faces as a way of representing the
witches. In several groups the students use the space of the classroom as a resource
to create rhythm in the performance of the scene. For example, one student said:
‘First you come in, then me, then eventually we’ll all be in a circle, then we do our
spell and we look up, OK?’ The students walk round in a circle as they read the
spell and in doing so they ‘create’ the central cauldron. A group of three girls
working together devise a kind of ‘dance routine’ in which they mirror each others’
movement, creating a sense of the witches all working and conspiring together.
They use a range of voices, changing the pitch, tone and pace of their voices to
create the different characters of the witches. In one group, drawing directly on a
scene from the film version they watched in an earlier lesson, the ‘stage director’
160 English in Urban Classrooms
lies still on a desk and the witches lean over him and pull at his clothes and jewellery. In the same group the students memorize the lines and speak them with the
broken rhythm of a rap track: ‘foul/is/foul/and/fair/is/fair’. As the students develop
their scenes through the use of voice, movement and ‘props’, they search to find a
way of representing thunder and lightning, and decide to turn the classroom lights
on and off, and bang the side of a filing cabinet.
Throughout the performances the groups frequently break into laughter, and
comment on their lack of ability. For instance, one student said: ‘Miss, man our
group’s stiff’ and ‘See look at them, you standing there like saying lines in monotone, look at him: big head – no brain’, and another said, ‘I can’t act; this boy can’t
act and this boy can’t read’.
Each group ‘performs’ the scene in front of the class. At the end of each the ‘audience’ of students spontaneously claps. The teacher then asks them to assess the performances by offering ‘good comments’ and ‘targets for making it better’. Comments
about the use of voice, the clarity of the lines, the importance of making sure that the
audience can see what is happening and so on are offered. The teacher praises all the
groups and emphasizes her pleasure that ‘so many of you have learnt the lines’.
Anna commented in her interview on the importance of the students’ performance of the play:
With Shakespeare particularly I think it is important for it to come to life in front
of them. I don’t think that they necessarily … you can talk about it, and you are
going through lines and say this means this, and they will talk about it, and they
will even come up with quite interesting perceptions, but I don’t think they get a
handle on the whole scene and how, unless they actually see it performed, or act
in it, and I think it gives them an understanding. Like you talk about it in the
class and then unless they actually think about, OK, they’ve got to say this, and
how should they say it, and how should they move, I don’t think they really
understand the whole. I think it just makes it more real for them.
Following the performance, the teacher writes a title, ‘Staging Act I scene I of
Macbeth’ on the whiteboard and instructs the students to ‘explain, describe,
account for what decisions you made’, and to answer six questions that she writes
on the board:
1
2
3
4
5
What did your group decide to do with the scene? Explain why.
What are you most proud of about your scene?
What could you improve?
What did you learn from seeing the other groups perform?
What effect would this scene have on an audience of 1603? How would
this be different from an audience of 2001?
6 If you were performing this scene in a theatre how would you dress the
witches? What backdrop (setting) would you use?
The textual cycle of the classroom 161
As the students work on these questions, Anna points at question five and says:
‘If you want to hit the high grades, C and over, you need to demonstrate to the
examiners that you understand that Shakespeare is to be performed not read … that
the effect is on audience not on reader, and to show you understand the historical
context, why would they watch it differently.’
Anna’s questions are discursively and institutionally positioned by the requirements of the curriculum, and by the materials on Shakespeare that inform her
approach to the text.
The whole text: ‘I know this sounds slightly confusing but it will
become clearer when you look at the pictures’
At no point during the series of lessons are the students given the complete written
text of Macbeth; their access to the whole play is mediated visually and
multimodally. In lesson seven, in order to ‘focus on starting to get to understand
the rest of the story of Macbeth’ the teacher reads a summary of the play and tells
the students that they will watch the rest of the television production of it in the
following two lessons. As she reads the summary and students begin to ask questions (for example, ‘Miss, is Banquo his friend?’) Anna says ‘I know this sounds
slightly confusing but it will become clearer when you look at the pictures’. The
pictures that she refers to are a set of 14 images with captions that portray key
moments in the plot. The students’ task is to arrange these in a sequence that
reflects the plot of the play. In this way the narrative is broken up and visualized,
and plot takes on a contextualizing function for the coursework.
Planning and writing: from multimodality to writing
In lessons four through to seven, Macbeth is produced as a multimodal text. Anna
starts lesson eight by writing the coursework title on the board, saying ‘this is your
coursework title’, and reading it out aloud. ‘Imagine you have been asked to direct
Macbeth. Explain how you would stage Act 1, Scene i to engage a modern audience’s attention and prepare them for the rest of the play.’
In this way Anna is ‘retextualizing’ the students’ retextualization of the play,
back from the multimodality of film, image and performance, to a written
commentary. She walks around the classroom distributing dictionaries and thesauruses to the students as they copy the title into their exercise books. She asks
students ‘What is the first thing you do with a title?’, to which the students reply
‘underline the key words’ – a means of preparing for examination. ‘What does
“direct” mean?’ For the students it means something to do with film; for the
teacher it relates to theatre, to ‘look, setting, costume, act, how speak, move’.
Other words underlined in Act 1, Scene i are ‘imagine’, ‘explain’, ‘audience’,
‘attention’, ‘engage’, ‘prepare them’, ‘stage’. Working in pairs, the students
‘brainstorm’ the title. The teacher draws on the result of the ‘brainstorms’ to write
a plan for the essay on the board; though she orders and rephrases these elements to
162 English in Urban Classrooms
produce a clear structure.
In this lesson all the work of the previous lessons is transformed into a resource
for writing the essay: ‘preparing us for this essay’. So far, the teacher’s essay plan
has been matched by the unfolding structure and sequence of the lessons.
The essay plan written on the board and copied down by students was:
1 Introduction – Introduce the main points of your essay (purpose); no more
than 30-word description of the plot of Macbeth.
2 Historical context – Why was it written? How was it received in Shakespeare’s day? What effect would it have had on the audience?
3 Look at stage directions: Setting – effect on audience; atmosphere created
sound effects; costumes – how they enter.
4 How the witches speak and move – body language.
5 Would this be a good representation of witches? What do we expect
witches to look like?
6 Conclusion
Anna tells the students to refer back to their notes in their exercise books and
reminds them that they have already written about each section of the essay. She
links the previous work on historical context to the essay-structure and to the
grading criteria: ‘This is a major part of your coursework grade – you must refer to
historical context to achieve a higher grade’. She tells them that when writing the
essay they ‘must use the language of the question in [their] answer’
The teacher breaks up the task of writing for the students. Literally, she numbers
the paragraphs, orders them, sets time limits on the writing of each section, and as
they write each paragraph she asks some of the students to read out their paragraphs to the class. She breaks up the amount of time they write for into manageable ‘chunks of time’. She provides them with tools that further structure,
chunking the text into manageable units. She has ‘helpful props’, for example a
poster on the classroom wall that reads ‘MUD: Make a point, Use evidence,
Discuss’. Anna says: ‘So you’re making a point, using your evidence, and you’re
discussing it afterwards’. This ‘tool’ demands a high degree of specification in
relation to the texts that the students are to produce, as does Anna’s commentary:
‘Every single paragraph, every point you make, you’re going to refer to how it
affects audience attention and prepares them for the rest of the play so that you can
show you’re answering the question.’
At this point, Anna works individually with the students as they write their introductions, she reads, writes and corrects them, instructing them to ‘take out any
unnecessary words and repetitions’. This is a frequent role for the teacher; it
provides interpersonal support for the students through difficult work. The curriculum itself is not very negotiable and the teacher has to ‘work around’ it. As homework the students are given the task to write the first three paragraphs of the essay.
Lesson ten is taken up with the teacher working with individual students in turn,
reading and correcting structure, vocabulary, grammar, spelling, very much a
The textual cycle of the classroom 163
focus on linguistic matters. With some students who have not written much the
teacher talks with them to generate ideas for them: ‘What do you need to do next?’,
and then ‘Write that down then’. In other cases the teacher and student talk and the
teacher writes, clarifying the task, editing, encouraging them to look back over
notes, linking their plan to what they have done and written in the previous lessons.
Anna is concerned that they are able ‘to stage the scene’: ‘You’ve already staged
the scene – look back at what you wrote and you’ve seen other versions of the
play’. She gives starter sentences ‘to help get the scary atmosphere I would…?’
Few students work during this time unless directly with Anna, in periods that last
between two and six minutes. Many sit with their arms raised waiting for her to
come to them. For most of then there is no independent working going on.
In the final coursework, when it is word processed, all the work of the teacher is
masked.
Conclusion
We wish to make three points in conclusion, which seem to typify what is likely to
happen to English under the pressure of present conditions. The first connects to
social relations.
There is a move from the collective process of study in relation to the text in
lessons one through to seven, to the ‘individual’ process of writing in lessons eight
through to twelve. The lessons in which the teacher introduces the play – via
image, video and performance – rely on collective sharing and discussion of the
text. When writing and the coursework are foregrounded the students are working
individually – although remnants of the collective character of the teaching
method in the school reappear at moments through these lessons, such as the
reading out of students’ writing, the task of swapping exercise books to get good
ideas from others. The teacher’s mode of working, and the social relations that she
creates when asking the students to write, change dramatically between the lessons
focused on the study of the text and the lessons focused on the essay. In the first
instance the teacher works in the main with the whole class, or small groups of
students. In the second, she works with the students entirely individually. Indeed
she comments that it is ‘not possible to talk to 30 people at the same time’. This
shift in mode has dramatic consequences for classroom management: while the
teacher is working with one student the majority of the other students are not
working; many are waiting for the teacher to help them.
Our second point concerns the curricularizing of English, and its effects on what
the subject can be or is becoming. The essay plan developed in lesson eight
provides a tight organizational structure that all of the students work with. Many of
the students missed this planning lesson (there was a transport strike) and they
were given the plan in lesson nine. Throughout the series of lessons that were
focused on the coursework essay, the teacher worked with the students to ‘fill in’
the content of the structure, suggesting opening sentences, reading out and
critiquing the students introductory paragraphs and so on. In this way the potential
164 English in Urban Classrooms
for the students actually to produce a ‘personal response’ (one of the assessment
criteria used to achieve the higher grades) – rather than learning how to construct
one – is limited. But then, ‘personal response’ has long since become an entity in
the English curriculum, like character and plot. In this sense the teacher’s assertion
that ‘even though an essay is a formal piece of writing you can still be quite
creative with it’ is both correct – yes you can, there are resources for doing so, and
it can be taught; there are explicitly describable resources to produce ‘personal
response’ – and it is also no longer correct: ‘personal response’ is now a curriculum
entity. The thesaurus distributed to the students is one such resource for this realization. The focus of Anna’s comments throughout the three lessons, and later on
her written comments on the student’s draft essays focused on these structures and
their use of language, rather than on their ideas.
Our last comment refers to the main point of this chapter, but in a sense also still
one of the main points of the subject: the status of text in English now. Throughout
this series of lessons, Anna and the students worked with a range of modes, and
were involved in the task of moving from a multimodally based exploration of
texts towards the written assignments. What seemed most strongly marked to us
was the disappearance of the text through its fragmentation in these lessons (as in
others that we observed); and in that sense that is one of the most interesting factors
in the production of English now. In the lesson discussed above, we see this fragmentation as the sign of a loss of confidence by the teacher about the teaching of
writing. It is a point we had noted in the chapter on ‘annotation’, as we had in
chapter 6 when we talked about the production of the students as able or as not
able. But in a wider sense it is the disappearance of texts as such – whether as
literary entities, or as textual entities of different kinds – to be replaced by a focus
on text as the site of mechanically performed operations.
As we have shown throughout the book, that is not the case in all the classrooms
we visited, but it is one likely response in schools that for various reasons see themselves under irresolvable pressures from all sides.
Chapter 11
And so to some final comments
Final comments
Throughout the book we have stressed that our aim was not to establish what
English was ‘then’ in 2000 or is now, as we have finished writing ‘the book of the
project’ in early 2004. So if not that, what have we done? We had also set out to
answer a question that seemed essential to us: ‘Can you understand English if you
focus on speech and writing alone?’ Here too we can ask what our conclusions
might be. And beyond our two aims, there are the broader questions: ‘Can we say
anything about English that has wider application?’ ‘Can we say anything that
might help in thinking about the future of the subject?’
So the four points we will deal with in this conclusion are:
1 ‘Have we been able to show how English comes to be realized in a specific
classroom, and what are the salient factors in that?’
2 ‘Is our methodology one that has produced a significantly different way of
looking? And ‘Have we seen something that would not otherwise have
been visible?’
3 ‘What are some of the implications of our study – for English teachers and
for the education of English teachers as well as for policy?’
4 ‘What remains as shared in the subject across the differences that we have
observed?’ In other words, is there something distinctive still, in and
across the variety of forms of English?
The production of English in its social environment
We have said a fair bit about what English is now, not as a comprehensive or
definitive account of what it is but as an indication of how this subject has
responded to the demands and pressures of policy and of the many aspects of the
social environments in which it comes to be realized. Whether in the production
of ‘student ability’, in the notion of what a ‘text’ is, in the manner in which an
entity such as ‘character’ is materialized, as in the many other examples we have
discussed, we show how it is the ensemble of social factors – realized through the
assemblage of modes of representation – that leads to the varying forms English
takes in interpersonal interactions as pedagogy and in ideational forms as
166 English in Urban Classrooms
curriculum in the classroom. Just to stress this point once more: it is not individual
factors individually considered, but the ensemble of factors as a whole that leads
to the form that English has.
So we think that here we have demonstrated how we can look at any one particular instance of English – whether in the ‘production’ of ability, or of character, of
text, or of whatever – and give a plausible account of the factors that have been
significant in shaping that bit of the subject in this way. Because we have focused
on the processes of the production of the subject – rather than on the description of
the subject at a particular moment – we think that our ‘findings’ remain valid
despite changes in policy, for instance those that have been implemented since the
end of the period of our data gathering, that is, the introduction of the Key Stage 3
Strategy. In other words, the processes that we describe remain as we have
described them even when different curricular or pedagogic issues are introduced.
Our research shows the subject English at an important moment of transition. It
is, we have suggested, being moved from being a subject that deals with values-asmeaning into one in which meanings are becoming curricularized as knowledge.
Since the late 1980s, schools have experienced a long period of transition from the
former state to the latter – a change that is also documented in a succession of
policy documents. Admittedly, to characterize English as the subject that is or was
quintessentially about meaning is a rough and ready characterization, but here we
will nevertheless push it a bit further. We might say that English is the subject that
has, traditionally, focused not just on meaning but on the combination of meaningand-values. Or to be more precise, English is the subject in which the issue is the
manner by which the meaning of values is established. In terms of the distinction
between school subjects focused on knowledge and those focused on meaning it
could be held that all the policy changes since the early 1990s have attempted to
move English much more in the direction of turning it into a subject dealing with
knowledge rather than meaning. English, to put it in sloganistic terms, is being
moved in the direction of subjects such as science.
There might be three objections to this at once. The first would be that all school
subjects convey or enact values – value production is one of the central features of
the work of the school. To this we would say that English differs from other
subjects and practices, in that ‘values’ and ‘meaning-making’ are closely woven
into its ideational work. Second, those who teach subjects such as religious
education, for instance, will insist that they are and have always been interested in
values. That is no doubt the case; it is our contestation that it is the conjunction of
meaning and values – the question ‘By what processes are the meanings of these or
those values established?’ – that had made English different and distinctive. The
third objection is a much newer one, one which would say: ‘Well, actually, English
is not all that different any more; because while English is being pushed in the
direction of explicitness in curriculum, subjects such as science are undergoing a
move in the other direction’. As science ceases to be the subject that gives access to
the discipline for the purposes of becoming a ‘scientist’, let’s say, and is moving in
the direction of providing essential information for informed participation in
Final comments 167
public life – often labelled by the inappropriate term ‘scientific literacy’ – it begins
to deal with matters of ethics, for instance, of understanding the implications of
scientific work on matters of everyday issues such as nutrition, health or the environment. There is, it seems, something like a ‘crossover’ in the trajectories of the
two subjects.
We are, as we point out above, aware that we may be overstating the case, but it
is nevertheless, we think, a discernible trend. In each case the motivation seems the
same: to make the subject fit contemporary social and economic demands – the
demands of competent communication in the one case, and of informed citizenship
in the other. What differs in each case is the (assumed or actual) starting point in
the movement of the two subjects.
To what extent this trend appears in any specific classroom varies, as we have
shown; it is dependent on what social factors are in play, and in what combinations.
However, what our research shows clearly is that while direction from above has
effects to a certain extent, and maybe even in partially predictable ways, these
ways are predictable not from the contents of the policies so much but rather much
more from the mix of social factors to which we have drawn attention: does the
school operate a policy of selection?; does it have a policy of streaming?; what
kinds of departmental culture does it enable?; how does it perceive its local environment from a number of different perspectives?; and so on. These factors are of
course in some senses the outcomes of national policy – a policy that favours
‘diversity’ between schools and selectiveness within them. In other senses, they
are the product of other sorts of histories, experiences and commitments. Their
effect is to ensure that English is always ‘inflected’: they position teachers differently in relation to their local practice in the English classroom, and supply them
with different resources, perspectives and constraints. Here, at classroom level, it
is the actions of the various agents in the ‘mix’ that are the telling factors, and the
decisions that are made that have real effects on the appearance of the subject. On
the basis of such an understanding, which takes into account the interplay of structure and agency, it is now possible to make some predictions on how a particular
mix of factors will play out in shaping the subject. These are findings that are
significant for anyone interested in policy or in curricular change.
As far as teachers are concerned, it is clear that while there is, seen from one
perspective, the threat or even the actuality of deskilling and deprofessionalization, there is, from the perspective of our research, the reality of the teacher as
a real agent in the mix. Teachers still can and do make a difference; and while we
have argued at various places in the book against an assumption that it is ‘teacherstyle’, or the individual characteristics of teachers in some way or other, which are
the telling issues, it is also the case that teachers remain more than merely the
‘deliverers’ of some pre-packed learning commodity – however much other
aspects of education policy may be tending in that direction. We think that the
insights from our study can be very useful in reflecting on that issue, and can be
applied in any one teacher’s reflection on their practice. Understanding their own
role in the ensemble of factors, and reflecting on the effects of their actions in all
168 English in Urban Classrooms
the ways we have indicated – not in any way mysterious and yet also not immediately open to view – will give teachers a clearer sense of possibilities and
constraints, and in what directions, in what domains, they exist.
The ‘curricularization’ of English is going on, and in that process English is
being forced to develop more explicit notions of its curriculum. The authors of the
book are united in seeing explicitness as essential; we see it as the sine qua non of
equitable participation and practices in the classroom. What our research demonstrates, however, is that explicitness as such guarantees nothing very much:
resources made explicit can be used for opening up possibilities in all sorts of
ways, and can be used to close things down pretty well entirely.
We think that there are other insights to be gained from our research. Yes, it is
possible from our perspectives on English to reflect on to other subjects, and may
be to understand processes there in ways not otherwise possible – our occasional
references to science are a case in point. But it is also possible to extent this insight
to other modes and sites of teaching. Consider the matter, ever more pressed on and
pressing for education as an institution, of using the facilities of the new information and communication technologies as the main – or at least a major – vehicle for
teaching – usually in the name of greater efficiency, effectiveness, of economies of
various kinds. What our study allows us to do is to engage in a mind-experiment.
English is shaped in specific, describable ways by the range of factors that we have
attended to, always acting in particular kinds of ensembles. We have not looked at
English outside of such contexts, but we could imagine subtracting factors, one or
more, from such ensembles: what would the shape of English be like outside of the
insistent teaching of the wall-display? Or without the set-up and layout of a classroom that brings you together with your peers and with the teacher in particular
ways? How would the entity ‘character’ be developed in the absence of a teacher,
of peers, of the specific characteristics of the school, of the neighbourhood, and of
all of their influence?
Our study, by showing the effects of these various factors allows us to imagine
what English – and maybe not just English – would be like learned in the absence
of all or some of these.
English and multimodality
English is that school subject which seems to be founded absolutely on the rock of
language, spoken or written. Much or maybe most of the research on English until
now has focused on the linguistic modes of speech and writing, and in particular
on speech-as-talk. We have shown that many of the meanings that ‘make English’
what it comes to be in particular ‘sites’ are never articulated in speech or in
writing, yet they are very much present nonetheless, and constantly inform and
infuse what English is. We have shown these meanings: for instance in relation to
what English itself ‘is’ – whether it is the subject that deals with the life world of
the students – in Wayford School; or the subject that brings resources to the
students as a means of dealing with significant issues in their world, in
Final comments 169
Ravenscroft school; or as the subject that is defined by the National Curriculum,
in Springton School; and indeed the others we have met and described. But we
have also shown these meanings in relation to what the entities of the curriculum
are, what ‘text’ comes to mean, how ‘character’ is to be understood, and so on.
The question that arises at this point most immediately is this: if these meanings
are so significant, why are they not expressed, articulated, not spoken or written?
Our answer might seem paradoxical: they are not spoken or written because to do
so would take their force, their power from them. Take the ‘suggestion’ of what
English is which is made by the wall display. On the one hand it is there: all the
time, silently and yet insistently, constantly. As it is not spoken it cannot be countered; if it were constantly spoken it would, on the one hand lose its force (or
become unbearably tedious, obnoxious) and on the other hand it would articulate
meanings that cannot safely be articulated. The ‘silent’ assertion of what English is
makes it constantly present and yet invisible, in the sense of withdrawing it from
the possibility of open contestation.
The ‘silent’ assertion that this or that conception of English is what obtains in
this classroom, or maybe even that it is a shared understanding of this subject –
whatever the meaning that is asserted – removes it from the possibility of
contestation. To speak it would be to state it explicitly in a mode that would make it
available for contestation, that would invite objection, rejection, change. It would
open the floodgates to the assertion of different claims, about texts and values,
about histories and hierarchies of value, about ethnicity and religion, about
language, class and gender. It is difficult to imagine what English would become if
it were made the explicit issue for debate, in the mode of talk, the mode that most
facilitates debate. In the form that it is asserted, a form of English is both put on
display, and withdrawn from being the locus of debate.
The same applies to forms of pedagogy: in the discussion on Theresa’s
Wedding, the teacher’s use of gesture and gaze allows her to marshal her rhetorical
resources as she needs them – without the possibility of being accused of favouring
one gender over another – by bringing her position clearly into the debate without
actually ‘speaking it’, and by making it possible to assert her position through the
voices of the students. To have said, especially to have said several times, ‘I don’t
want to hear from any of the boys at all’ would have made the debate impossible
immediately. Just as in another of our schools, the teacher did not need to say –
what would have been impossible to speak – ‘for you, here at this table, English
can only have this – much reduced – meaning’.
So our methodology is justified, has stood the test of revealing aspects of
English both crucial and central and yet never spoken; it is a methodology that
offers an entirely different approach to how, by what means, in what meanings, the
subject is realized. Talk alone, or even talk supplemented by an attention to
writing, could not have produced the understandings that we have shown.
170 English in Urban Classrooms
Implications
And so we come to the issue of implications. We promised that we would say
something about this from the perspective of English teachers, and from the
perspective of the education of English teachers, as well as from the perspective
of policy.
From the first of these perspectives we can ask, in absolutely practical terms: Do
our insights, does our methodology offer a way of acting differently? Do they offer
a means of reflecting for a teacher on her or his practice that would allow them to
change aspects of their practice, should they wish to do so? Our question here is set
in the context we mentioned in the Preface: all the teachers who allowed us to see
their teaching are professionals whose clear aim is to do the very best for the
students in their classrooms, to maximize their possibilities of success in English.
Given that, we can imagine an in-service programme in which we would look,
with a group of teachers, at the classroom we have discussed in Chapter 4. Our
absolute precondition would be that we would not slip, immediately or maybe at
all, into evaluation, but rather that we would describe what we can see in the
teacher’s interaction with the students at the first table, and analyse what factors
have what kinds of meanings, and what factors have what kinds of effects. We
would do that for her interaction with the students at the second table and compare
the descriptions and our analysis. We would then pose the question: What could
the teacher have done, do, differently in her approach to the students at the second
table?
We make several assumptions in this. For instance we assume that in making
explicit the resources the teacher uses, in linking them to specific social factors,
including factors that the teacher might be thought to have held silently, we
provide the teachers with resources for reflecting on their own practice. We
assume about the students that however much they might actually differ in ‘ability’, they will recognize very well that the teacher acted differently at the table
from which she has just come, and understand the meanings entailed in that difference, even if they might not be conscious of them, or be able to articulate them.
These assumptions would then guide the response to the question: ‘What might be
done differently?’ Some things are clearly different: sitting down vs not sitting
down; eye-contact vs no eye-contact; taking the piece of paper with the textfragment vs not taking the paper; asking questions and immediately answering
them herself vs asking questions that are left to be answered by the students; and so
on.
The teacher works in a school that has adopted a policy of streaming, though not
one of selection. That is a policy decision by the school taken as a response to its
sense of how best to deal with the pressures that the students experience in their
lives in the neighbourhood. However, the English department as such, much
against the pressure of the school, has resisted introducing streaming in English
classrooms. As we have said, we know both from our observations and from interviews with this teacher (as with others) that she sees it as her aim to ensure that
Final comments 171
even the weakest students in the class should succeed in terms of their examination
performance. That, for her, is a given. She apportions her time at the different
tables very precisely – equitably – whether aware or not, at about six minutes of
interaction per table.
Now, we can suggest immediately that the teacher could adopt the same practice
with all students, at all tables: sit down at each table; not take the piece of paper at
any table; annotate or not at each table; and so on. Of course, she has very good
reasons for acting differently in each case, though the differences in action immediately change the possibilities for action, the potentials for agency, of the
students: not having the sheet means not being able to write or be responsible for
writing; answering the questions for the students means not giving them that task;
and so on. The students are positioned in specific ways, and these ways have
effects on how the students come to see themselves.
Of course, leaving agency to the students has penalties attached: they might not
write, and they might not speak. Long silences hold a ‘terror’; and long silences
are, from the perspective of ‘achieving a goal’ unproductive. Here our issue of time
enters: six minutes is not sufficient time for a change in practice; six minutes per
table is linked to the ‘achievement of a goal’ in the immediate term, as well as to
notions of equity. To change practices would require setting the targets in a
different time-frame: something like ‘over the course of this term, I will attempt to
change my practice in relation to…’. And at this point also another consideration
has entered, that of the policy environment, the system of time-organization, in
which the teacher and the school operate.
In England at the moment, as of course in all Anglophone countries, there are
stringent regimes of performativity. The government, in England, expects a
constant raising of ‘achievement’ measured in terms of results in examinations.
Schools can be successful or not in these terms, but success, by and large, is
defined for all schools in the publicly funded sector in these terms. At this point the
success of the school, and the success of the teacher become somewhat blurred in
relation to the success of the individual student. The success of the student
becomes the necessary prerequisite to the success of the teacher, whose ‘performance’ is measured in these terms; and the success of all teachers becomes the
means for the achievement of the school’s success. An unsuccessful school will
suffer all kinds of penalties, many of which, in the end, reduce the resources of all
kinds available to the school.
The teacher’s strategy in this context is to minimize risk: risk for the individual
student, by setting an assumed safe goal for each student; and risk for herself and
the school at the same time of not meeting ‘targets’. In this environment it becomes
a high-risk strategy to adopt medium- to long-term goals, or to adopt a strategy that
defines success differently, namely in terms of the realization of the potential of
each student. We have encountered teachers in the group we met who were
prepared to maximize risk (Lizzy in Wayford School); and whose students, as the
result of that risk, showed the benefit in terms of consistently better-than-average
performance in exams in that school. We have also described teachers from a
172 English in Urban Classrooms
school that had a policy of selection and streaming (such as Irene from
Ravenscroft) where the risk was diffused, so to speak, by the policy of selection,
which at the same time changed the school’s ‘climate’ in every way – whether
from the perspective of the teacher or those of the students. In short then, ‘risk’ is
an issue always faced in the context of the environment and its potentials, a matter
in part within and in part beyond beyond the individual personality of the teacher.
When all of this is set in the much wider and pervasive ‘culture of blame’ that
characterizes contemporary anglophone societies, it becomes possible to begin to
see where a start would need to be made in policy in order to begin to change the
present situation of designed underachievement. Judging from the results of our
study, the present policy climate, is one in which the denial of students’ potential
has become a design feature of educational policy. It is the paradox at the base of
present educational policy and practice, the surface rhetoric of which is about the
raising of achievement. It is not – as our study shows – that schools and teachers
are powerless in the face of this paradox; it is the case that it makes the realization
of the ostensibly proclaimed goals difficult or impossible in many cases.
Lastly, then, a comment on our fourth point, namely what makes English recognizably English, even across these differences. What, in other words, makes it
possible for us to say ‘this is not history’, ‘this is not “values education”’ or whatever. In subjects in which knowledge is foregrounded, the issue is straightforward:
we recognize the subject by the ostensive curriculum. In science, the topic ‘states
of matter’ remains ‘states of matter’ irrespective of the pedagogy adopted, and irrespective of the teacher’s teaching style or personality. The curriculum-entity might
be well taught, or badly, but it remains recognizably the same. To some small
extent this is true of English, though as we have shown throughout the book it is far
less so than it is in other subjects. There is, in English, no matter what the
curriculum-entity might be, a constant issue, namely the connection of curriculum
and the ‘life’ or the ‘life-world’ of students. We have of course seen this overtly in
many instances, whether in the discussion of Theresa’s Wedding, or in the walldisplays in different classrooms. In other subjects this is attempted at times, under
the banner of ‘making maths relevant’, or of ‘making science illuminate problems
of the everyday’. However, these have remained largely unsuccessful projects, and
in general the students have seen through them as facile attempts.
In English, by contrast, the connection of curriculum to life is always present,
whether in the attempt at teaching ‘literary sensibility’, or in the link between the
subject matter of a short story and the lives of the young people debating it, or
even, in the current context of issues around literacy, where the matter becomes
one of ‘your forms of spoken or written English’ seen in relation to ‘acceptable or
standard forms of speech and writing’. ‘Connection’ of curriculum to life-world is
as present or maybe even more so in the reality of disconnection – ‘this issue, this
text, has nothing to say or to do with me’ – than in real connection. Where in the
science classroom the attempt to connect curriculum and life always becomes a
matter of epistemology – ‘the everyday world is like the world of scientific explanation’ or ‘the everyday world furnishes us with the problems that science can
Final comments 173
answer’ – in the English classroom the (dis-)connection is immediate and present.
In our data we have a statement from a group of students from Springton. Asked
what they saw as the difference between science and English they said:
… what you are being taught from a science teacher is different
from what you are being taught by an English teacher ’cos you are learning
about the outside world, the things that happen with animal cells, human
organisms and that, space. In English it is very different.
INTERVIEWER: It is a really hard question, but if you learn about the outside
world in science, what do you learn about in English?
STUDENTS:
The answer to this ‘really hard question’ was given by Kaleem, one of this group
of students – regarded as being of low ability. We leave to him the last words in this
book: ‘The inside, I guess, about society and culture.’
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Index
Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations not included in text page range.
ability 79, 83–94
access 85, 143, 147
actualization 18–19
Anna: Macbeth 153–64; Springton School
144
annotation: of texts 131–40
architecture: of schools 38
Aristotelian theory 19–20
aspirations: of research 13–14
attainment: GCSE English 15
autonomy: of teachers 73, 85, 98, 99
Ball, S. 18, 143
Barber, Michael 72
Barton, D. 117
Baynham, M. 117
Bearne, E. 129
Beck, U. 56, 102
Berman, Marshall 82
Bernstein, B. 23, 86, 87, 117
Blair, Tony 72, 73
body-posture: students’ 34–5, 65, 91;
Susan’s 91, 92–3
Bourdieu, P. 14
Bourne, Jill vii, 84, 130
Bourne, R. 40
Bradley, F.H. 100
Buckingham, D. 15, 141
Cambridge School Shakespeare series 154
Campbell, J. 70
‘character’: entity of 100–15
circle time 73–5
class, social 148–9
classroom arrangements see layout of
classroom
classroom management 29, 33
classrooms: and pedagogy 38–9;
Ravenscroft School: Irene 62–8;
Springford School: Susan 42–8;
Wayford School: John 48–57; Lizzy
57–62
classroom time 74–7
Condition of Postmodernity, The 69–70
Conservatism 17
Conservative government 141
Coulthard, M. 13
Cox report (1989) 142
‘creative destruction’ 70, 73, 82
Crucible, The: entity of character 105–15
cultural diversity 16
‘cultural hybridity’ 146
cultural resources: students’ 84
curriculum: and pedagogy 30 see also
National Curriculum
curriculum entities see entities
Daniels, H. 39
data collection methods 8–9
David, Miriam 15
Davies, C. 18
debates 121–3
departmental ethos 1, 48–9, 62, 76, 150
design: of schools 38
Diane: The Crucible 105–15; student
confidence 86
differential ability 83–4
differentiation 73, 88
displays see visual displays
diversity: in English lessons 22–3
Doyle, B. 18
Dymoke, S. 132
182 Index
Dyson, A. 117
Eagleton, T. 100
Economic and Social Research Council
(ESRC) ix
educational history 72–3
educational reform: post-1988 1, 15
Edwards, T. 85, 117
egalitarianism 16, 73
electronic media x
Elsheikh, E. 133
embodiment: Irene 33–4; John 29–30
‘empty’ time 79, 82
English: comparison with science 3–5
English GCSE examination 132
English National Curriculum 101
Englund, Tomas 18
entities 99–100; character 100–15; of the
curriculum 2; English curriculum 4–5;
science curriculum 3
‘entitlement’ 85
equity 105, 143, 147
ESRC (Economic and Social Research
Council) ix
ethnic diversity: in project schools 6–7
ethnicity 148–9
ethnic tensions 144–5
ethos: departmental 1, 48–9, 76, 150
Evans, Linda 72
evaporated time 70
examinations 85; pressure of 77–9, 133;
success 80
examination syllabuses 15
example lessons: Ravenscroft School:
Diane 105–15; Irene 30–5, 80–1,
118–30, 133–6; Springton School: Anna
153–63; Julia 103–5; Susan 87–98;
Wayford School: John 23–30, 136–9
expectation levels 83–4
explicitness 4, 66, 168
Fifteen Thousand Hours 70
Fiske, E. 38
Foucault, M. 39
fragmentation 78, 104, 157–8, 164
framing 66; displays 46–7
Franks, Anton vii
Freedman, A. 20
Furlong, J. 85
furniture arrangement see layout of
classroom
Gardner, K. 132
gaze: Irene 33–4; John 29; Susan 91, 93
gender construction 119–30
‘genres’ 19
gesture 121–2; Irene 33–4; John 29; Susan
94–6
Gewirtz, S. 15
Gibson, Rex 153–63
Gillborn, D. 85
Globe Education 154
government policies 1, 15–17, 143; setting
88
Grace, G. 16, 85
‘grammars’ 19
Gregory, E. 117
Grosvenor, I. 38, 40
Hackman, S. 131
Halliday, Michael 20, 118
Hamilton, D. 14, 40
Hamilton, M. 117
Hardcastle, John vii, 41
Hargreaves report (Improving Secondary
Schools) 70
Harvey, David 69–70, 71, 82
Heath, S.B. 117
Hextall, I. 15, 16
higher-order literacy skills 118
Hodge, R. 41
home–school relations 15–16
implications 170–3
Improving Secondary Schools (Hargreaves
report) 70
inclusive education 77
Inner London schools 5–7
intelligence testing 84
interviews 9, 10
Irene: annotation 133–6; classroom 62–8;
Ravenscroft School 30–6; selection of
texts 150–1; whole-class debate 118–30
Jackson, H. 132
Jewitt, Carey vii, 41, 130
John: annotation 136–9; classroom 49–57;
selection of texts 147–50; Wayford
School 23–30
Jones, K. vii, ix, 14, 16, 72, 117, 141
Julia: Romeo and Juliet 103–5; selection of
texts 145–6
Kenner, C. 117
Kermode, F. 100
Key Stage 3 Strategy 5, 99–100
Index 183
Kiss Miss Carol: annotation 136–9; cultural
experiences 147–50
Kress, Gunther vii, 3, 17–18, 32, 39, 41,
99, 117, 129
Labour Party: continuity 72 see also New
Labour
Larsen, J. 38
Lawn, M. 38
layout of classroom 39–42; Irene’s 31, 62;
John’s 23–6, 49–50; Lizzy’s 58, 60;
Susan’s 42–3
league tables 70
Leavis, F.R. 100
Leney, T. 133
lessons: examples see example lessons;
selection of 8
linguistic approach 3
literacy skills: higher-order 118
literary practices 116–18
literary sensibility 4
literary texts 116; selection of 141–4
Lizzy: circle time 75; classroom 57–62;
departmental ethos 48–9, 76; time
orientation 74
‘look’: of the classroom 23
Luke, A and C. 16
Lunzer, E. 132
MacArthur, B. 40
Macbeth 153–63
Maclure, S. 40
Mahoney, P. 15, 16
Marshall, B. 18, 144
meanings-as-signs 2
Medway, P. 20
Menck, Peter 18
Mercer, N. 13, 117
mixed ability classrooms 83
mixed ability teaching 73
moral values 100–1, 129
Moss, G. 117
movement: of teacher: Irene 31–2; John 26,
50; Susan 90–2
multimodal approach 2–3, 10, 118
multimodality 21, 39
National Curriculum: effect of 15, 98, 99;
entitlement 5, 85; example lesson 88;
modularization 70; teachers’ attitudes
76–7, 82; text selection 142–3
National Curriculum documents: display of
27, 54–5, 60, 63, 66
National Literacy Framework 15, 70–1
NEAB poetry anthology 132
Neill, S. 70
New Labour 16, 17, 85; educational history
72–3
Northedge, A. 131
note-taking 131–40
orchestration 33
Oyama, R. 41
Pahl, K. 117
parents: role of 15–16
Paul: setting 86
Pay and Conditions Act (1987): working
hours 70
pedagogies: and classrooms 38–9; and
curriculum 30; examples of lessons 23–36
personal response: to texts 129
pilot studies ix–xi
poetry anthology, NEAB 132
policies: educational 85; text selection 143;
government 15–17
policy time 69–82
Pollard, A. 117
popular culture 43, 48, 57, 61, 62, 66
posture: students’ 34–5, 65; Susan’s 91,
92–3
Preen, D. 143
Protherough, R. 132
race 148–9
‘radical dialogue’ 85
Ravenscroft School 7; annotation 133–6;
classrooms 62–8; The Crucible 105–15;
entity of character 101, 103, 105–15;
example lessons: Diane 105–15; Irene
30–5, 80–1, 133–6; streaming 85–6; text
analysis and debate 118–30; text
selection 150–2; time-practices 80–1
re-agenting 14–17
Reay, D. 15
regulatory frameworks 15
Reid, Euan viii
research project: ‘The Production of School
English’ ix
‘responsibilization’ 15
rhetorical theory 19–20
Romeo and Juliet: cultural experiences
145–6; entity of character 103–5
Rutter, M. 70
Sarland, C. 144, 152
184 Index
Scanlon, M. 15
Scheflen, A.E. 118
schools: Ravenscroft 7; selection for
project 5–6; Springton 6; Wayford 6–7
Schools Building on Success (2001 Green
Paper) 72
School Standards and Framework Act
(1998) 15
science: comparison with English 3–5
Seaborne, M. 38
Sefton-Green, J. 141
selection policies 6–7, 103
semiotic approach 2–3, 10
semiotics 22
semiotic theory 9–10
set texts 101
Shakespeare: Macbeth 153–63; Rex
Gibson’s approach 154
sign-making 19–20
signs 22, 42
Sinclair, J. 13
SISC (Subjectivity in the School
Curriculum) group ix
social semiotics 41–2
speech: Irene 32–3; John 28–9; Susan 97
see also talk
Springton School 6; classrooms 42–8;
entity of character 103–5; example
lessons: Anna 153–63; Julia 103–5;
Susan 87–98; Macbeth 153–63; mixedability classes 87–98; Romeo and Juliet
103–5; text selection 144–7; timepractices 77–9
standards 16, 73
Stephen: departmental ethos 76; timeorganization 74
streaming 83, 85, 103; Ravenscroft School
85–6
Street, B and J. 117
students: displays of texts 27, 32, 43, 46,
52, 54, 57–60, 61, 64, 67; posture of
34–5, 65, 91; ‘responsibilization’ 15
student time 75, 79, 82
subjectivity ix
Subjectivity in the School Curriculum
(SISC) group ix
Superman and Paula Brown’s New
Snowsuit: annotation 136–9
Susan: body-posture 91, 92–3; classroom
42–8; constructing ability 87–98;
Springton School 144–5
talk-show genre 121, 127
teachers: autonomy 85, 98, 99; in the
project 7–8
teacher–student interaction 89–98
teacher time 69–82
television x
Teresa’s Wedding: annotation 133–6;
whole-class debate 118–30
testing 85
texts: selection of 141–4
textual fragmentation 78
theory 9–10
‘The Production of School English’:
research project ix, 5
Thompsom, E.P 71
time: organization of 69–82
time and learning 73–5
‘time-organization’ 71, 72, 73
time-practices 71; Ravenscroft School
80–1; Springton School 77–9; Wayford
School 73–7
Tomlinson, S. 85
topic guides 9
transcriptions 10
transmission pedagogy 64
talk 1–2, 10 see also speech
Youdell, D. 85
uniformity: of classrooms 42
universalism: text selection 146–7
values-as-meaning 166
van Leeuwen, T. 30, 32, 39, 41
video data recordings 8–9
visual displays: changes in 39–41; Irene’s
classroom 32, 62–4, 66–8; John’s
classroom 26–7, 50–4; Lizzy’s
classroom 57–60, 61–2; Susan’s
classroom 43–8
voice quality: Irene 34; John 30
Volosinov, V. 19
Walkerdine, V. 14
Waterhouse, P. 40
Wayford School 6–7; annotation 136–9;
classrooms 48–62; example lessons:
John 23–30, 136–9; Stephen 37–8; text
selection 147–50; time-practices 73–7
Williams, A. 117
Williams, D. 39
witchcraft: Macbeth 154–5
writing: Susan 96–7
writing skills 66–7